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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 22, 2023

The Senate has confirmed three top defense leaders. Last night it confirmed Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to replace Army General Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he retires at the end of the month. Today, it confirmed General Randy A. George as Army chief of staff and General Eric M. Smith as Marine Corps commandant.

The Senate filled the positions at the top of our military by working around the hold extremist senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has put on more than 300 military promotions, allegedly because he objects to the government’s policy of providing leave and travel allowance for service members who have to travel to obtain abortions.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post focused on the House Republicans today, though, when she wrote: “The GOP completely gone off its rocker—incapable of passing House spending, ranting and raving at AG, cooking up ludicrous and baseless impeachment, unable to greet Zelensky with joint session. This is not normal. This is egregious. You'd think the reporting would reflect it.”

Indeed, the House Republicans remain unable even to agree to talk about funding the government, let alone actually passing the appropriations bills Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to four months ago. Today, right-wing extremists in the House blocked a procedural vote over a Pentagon funding bill, keeping what is normally an easily passed bipartisan bill from even reaching the floor for debate. McCarthy acknowledged to reporters that he is frustrated. “This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down. It doesn’t work.”

The extremists do indeed appear unconcerned about the effects of their refusal to fund the government, and since they have the five or six votes they need to sink the measures McCarthy wants to pass with only Republican votes, this handful of representatives are the ones deciding whether the government will shut down.

McCarthy could pass clean funding bills through the House whenever he wishes, but he refuses. To do so would mean working with Democrats, and that would spark a vote to throw him out of the speakership. And so, rather than keep the members in Washington, D.C., to work on the appropriations bills over the weekend, McCarthy recognized he did not have the votes he needs and sent them home.

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

Extremist leader Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) responded to Trump’s statement with his own: “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution” to fund the government,” he wrote. “Hold the line.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted: “House Republicans refuse to fund the government to protect Donald Trump.”

Trump’s accusation that President Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department against him and others who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is the opposite of what has really happened. Not only has Biden stayed scrupulously out of the Justice Department’s business—leaving in place the Trump-appointed leader of the investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, for example—but also we received more proof yesterday that it was Trump, not Biden, who weaponized the Justice Department against his enemies.

Nora Dennehy, who abruptly resigned from former special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, explained in her confirmation hearing to Connecticut’s state supreme court yesterday that she quit because Trump’s Department of Justice was tainted by politics. Before joining the probe, she said, “I had been taught and spent my entire career at [the] Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner.”

But Trump and his loyalists expected Durham’s investigation to prove that there was a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and then–attorney general William Barr seemed to be working to support that fantasy, even though there was no evidence of it (as shown by the fact the investigation ultimately fizzled). Barr was, she thought, violating DOJ guidelines in his public comments about the investigation and in his consideration of releasing an interim report before the 2020 election.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it,” Dannehy said. “So I resigned.”

The resistance of the extremists to McCarthy’s leadership is spilling over into foreign affairs as well. Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in Washington, D.C., where he met with President Biden at the White House and with leaders at the Pentagon, and spoke to a closed-door session for the Senate. But he did not speak to the House of Representatives. While McCarthy met with him privately, the speaker maintained that “we just didn’t have time” for him to address the House.

As part of their demands, House extremists want to cut funding for Ukraine’s defense. This would, of course, work to strengthen Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hand in his war against Ukraine. Earlier this month, former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan told MSNBC that it is “absolutely essential” to Putin that Trump win back the White House in 2024. “I think it is Putin's main lifeline in order to find some way to salvage what has been a debacle in Ukraine for him," Brennan said. "If Trump is able to return to the White House...Putin could have a like-minded individual that he can work with, detrimental to U.S. interests certainly and detrimental to Western interests overall.” The intelligence community assesses that Putin worked to help Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and is pushing pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine propaganda now.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III assured Zelensky that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine and work with allies and partners to make sure it has the weapons it needs. Lara Seligman of Politico reported today that the Pentagon will continue to fund Ukraine operations even if there is a government shutdown. Military activities deemed crucial to national security can be exempted from being shuttered during a government shutdown.

And finally, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced today that he will be stepping down as chair of his media empire, including both Fox Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel (FNC), and News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other newspapers. In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched the Fox News Channel with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances.

The Fox News Channel initially presented news from a conservative viewpoint, but over time its opinion shows, delivered as if they were news, came to dominate the channel. Those shows presented a simple narrative in which Americans—overwhelmingly white and rural—wanted the government to leave them alone but “socialists” who wanted social welfare programs demanded their tax dollars. Isolated in the fantasy world of FNC, its viewers became such fanatic adherents to right-wing politics that FNC wholeheartedly trumpeted Trump’s Big Lie after he lost the 2020 presidential election because viewers turned away from FNC when some of its personalities acknowledged that Biden had won..

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said today that “Murdoch created a uniquely destructive force in American democracy and public life, one that ushered in an era of division where racist and post-truth politics thrive.” Margaret Sullivan, formerly the Washington Post’s media critic, wrote in The Guardian that FNC was “a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth and fair elections.” Murdoch, she wrote, wreaked “untold havoc on American democracy.”

Murdoch sees it differently. In his resignation letter, he attacked “bureaucracies” who wanted to “silence those who would question their provenance and purpose” and “elites” who “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.” “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth,” he wrote.

Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #Media Matters #corrupt GOP #anti-democratic GOP #Big Lie #government shutdown

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 months

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On Thursday, the Justice Department announced charges against an FBI informant with inventing the claims that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had hired Hunter Biden as a way of channeling bribes to Joe Biden. David Weiss—the Trump-appointed special counsel who had also levied charges against Hunter Biden—announced the charges, contending the informant had “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts” into salacious allegations targeting the president.

The informant, 43-year-old Alexander Smirnov, had allegedly given agents false information in 2020 and was known to strongly dislike Joe Biden. According to the indictment, Smirnov’s story fell apart upon questioning in 2023. He was arrested in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

So just how much does it matter to Republicans that this FBI informant has been charged with fabricating his claims? How much does it change the narrative about the “Biden crime family” that has become entrenched among both right-wing politicians and media?

We can’t assume the development will be taken seriously on the right, given Trump supporters’ distrust of the FBI. On Fox News, the biggest peddler of this narrative, the hosts ignored the news. But if it were taken seriously, it would come as a significant blow.

The FBI informant, who had not been publicly named previously, was the star figure of possibly the most credible accusation against the president. You may recall the whole drama from May 2023 in which Rep. James Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley demanded the FBI release “an unclassified record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.” That was the form that contained this fabrication from Smirnov.

Known in the Fox News internet sleuth community as the FD-1023 form, it contained claims from an informant asserting that the then-unnamed Smirnov had spoken with Burisma’s founder and discovered that Burisma officials had tried to pay the two Bidens $5 million each for their help in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma for corruption. If that had been true, it would have been a true bombshell: As vice president, Joe Biden would have leveraged his power over U.S. foreign policy to protect a foreign company from prosecution in exchange for a bribe. In other words, it would have been a clear-cut case of corruption. But there was a real reason the FBI resisted sharing this form: It contained an unsubstantiated allegation from a dubiously reliable source. In 2020, the Trump DOJ had investigated Smirnov’s claims and failed to find any evidence supporting them. There was no reason to present the allegations as legitimate.

The FBI was right to worry that releasing the form would be dangerous. When it gave a redacted version of the form to the legislators, the Republican hype machine went into overdrive. In his position as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Comer repeatedly alluded to proof of corruption, seemingly based on the form. But more importantly, Fox News latched onto the allegations, accusing the FBI of covering up for the Bidens and portraying the informant as highly credible and in danger of retaliation. Sean Hannity emerged as the form’s biggest booster. According to data from the liberal group Media Matters, his show aired 85 segments promoting the bribery claim in 2023. On Fox, the president’s corruption became an assumed truth. Smirnov’s claims also became central to the House GOP’s failed effort to impeach Biden.

One might hope that there would be vast recriminations and public embarrassment now that the feds have formally charged the source of so much drama with making it all up. But the damage in public perception from this episode is done and likely can’t be corrected with the news of the informant’s arrest. Even if the right took it seriously, though, Fox News still has a few other “Biden crime family” storylines to mine that are not connected to Smirnov or his form.

As the Media Matters data showed, while Smirnov’s claims were the most exciting accusations, Hannity had even more segments (though fewer triumphant monologues) on Comer’s vague claims that Hunter Biden had used shell companies to “launder the money they were receiving from foreign nationals.” (The Washington Post reported that these were all actually legitimate businesses, except for one short-lived company that may have been unconnected to Hunter Biden.)

Then there’s the connected claim from a Comer memo that the committee had found more than $20 million in payments from “foreign sources” to Biden family members or their associates. None of the payments were directly connected to Joe Biden, and the Post found that only $7 million of that total went to Biden family members.

There’s also the 2017 email in which a Hunter Biden associate used the phrase “10 held by H for the big guy?” in discussions of a partnership between Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden and the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy. The draft agreement and later official agreement that resulted from this exchange made no mention of Joe Biden; there’s no evidence the president was involved in any of this.

And finally, there’s a threatening 2017 WhatsApp message that Hunter sent to a Chinese executive: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” Democrats have maintained that this was pure bluster from Hunter, who was struggling with drug addiction at the time. An associate of Hunter’s testified that they were trying to create the “illusion of access.”

There are even more snippets the right has fixated on. For years now, the right-wing media world has been meticulously scouring all communications and documents related to Hunter Biden for evidence of his father betraying the American public. While officials have found evidence of Hunter’s illegal and unethical behavior around his taxes and use of firearms, there has been nothing officially tying Joe Biden to any wrongdoing. Smirnov’s claims were the most likely source of anything solid showing that the president was involved. Joe Biden may have been reckless in failing to prevent his son from using his family name for clout, but the Republicans’ case for actual corruption is now a lot emptier.

#us politics #news #republicans #conservatives #president joe biden #hunter biden #house oversight committee #impeachment #2024 #fbi #David Weiss #Alexander Smirnov #Rep. James Comer #sen. chuck grassley #Viktor Shokin #Burisma #Media Matters #the washington post #CEFC China Energy

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hdbjhsbhzab · 4 months

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Elon looking at everybody on twitter tweaking tf out because of it being down bc he diddling with the controls like dream diddles with kids

#twitter #elon musk #elongated muskrat #elon twitter #twitter x #xitter #media matters #free speech #elon musty #fuck elon #twitter down again #twitter down #x dot com #dream #dream is a freak

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999-roses · 11 months

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while we're talking about north korean defector industry being part of the [western - including south korean] media agenda to smear, vilify, and discredit the DPRK,, (particularly how specific defectors seriously make serious bank from selling these lies through books and media appearances, although, this is quite the exception and not the norm)

consider Operation Yellowbird. a short background:

Operation Yellowbird was a collaborative effort between British HK, MI6, CIA and other actors to smuggle persons wanted for their dissident actions during the 1989 protests in Beijing.

known CIA regime change agents were spotted (and reported by western media sources!) in the area during the protests in Beijing, on and near Tiananmen Square in summer of 1989.

for those of you who still believe in the "Tiananmen Massacre" narrative, and are skeptical about official Chinese accounts, here is a reading list, including accounts and news articles from western journalists who were there on the ground, about what actually happened. available here (hint there was no mass killing of civilians)

These evacuated "dissidents" were quickly admitted to Ivy league and other high-prestige academic institutions in the west, some even awarded honorary degrees. Some of the most prominent people relocated by Operation Yellowbird are now business and tech execs, venture capitalists/financial managers, NGO founders living comfortable lives in the west.

Their exaggerated (and inconsistent) recollections of the protests that ended with June 4th, recounted to western media years later while living in the west, has built up the myth of a massacre of civilians by an "authoritarian and totalitarian" Chinese government. They're still making documentaries and media appearances and testifying to US Congress. The mischaracterization of the events in summer 1989 that feeds into sinophobic narratives about Chinese people and the Chinese government are built on hyperbolic recollections and outright lies, and ritualistic recounting every year by these people keeps this narrative afloat in the minds of westerners. Concern for "human rights violations," especially when exaggerated or even built on towers of lies, are a common sympathy-garnering tactic for manufacturing thirst and support for "intervention" (read: war) by portraying “enemies” as monsters, and also works to muddy the waters about actual human rights violations regularly committed by the United States, both foreign and domestic.

Yeah we should absolutely dunk on the Yeonmi Parks. But we should also very much also dunk on "What we are looking anticipating is bloodshed, and only when the square is filled with rivers of blood will Chinese unite, but how could I tell my followers that I need them to sacrifice their lives [for "our" cause]?... But I cannot continue on in square, I'm different from them, I'm on a blacklist, I don't want to die." Chai Ling

#&the diaspora living the in west have the audacity to ask others to join their stopaapihate campaign. girl the call is coming from the house #I've seen plenty of people online call Ling a CIA asset but I'll leave that judgment up to others #she's apparently a born-again Christian. & has started to use language equating the CPC to Satan #hmmm yeah it smells kinda like the falungong cult's primary directive to rid the earth of the 'evil' the communist party in china #so their cult leader lihongzhi can just walk back into china become the One True Messiah-Leader or whatever fantasy #sino #media matters #sinophobia

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eovin-hime · 5 months

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#ukraine #russia is a terrorist state #media manipulation #media matters #misinformation #russia must burn #war in ukraine #stand with ukraine #misinformation campaign

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scottguy · 8 months

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Article: X is placing ads for brands like the NFL and MLB next to unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish people and 9/11

X is placing ads for brands like the NFL and MLB next to unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish people and 9/11

Seriously... dump X. It's time to abandon that platform entirely. It's beyond saving.

#X #Twitter #Musk #Media Matters

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settlercolonialismisbad · 4 months

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#i/p #human rights #media analysis #media matters #world news #free gaza

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antidrumpfs · 1 month

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North Carolina superintendent nominee has worked for a group that's promoted school shooting, 9/11, and Hitler conspiracy theories

Republican Michele Morrow has touted her work for Liberty First Grassroots, which claimed of school shootings: “This is how Deep State operates and every one knows it! These set ups are called False Flags.”

Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee to head North Carolina’s schools, has spent years working for a group that’s spread extreme conspiracy theories.

Those include claims that the “deep state” is behind school shootings; 9/11 was an inside job; former President Barack Obama has a “Hitler blood line” because “allegedly Hitler is Obama’s grandfather”; elites drink the blood of children; and public schools are part of a “plan set up by the Illuminati to mold the brains of our children.”

#right wing extremism #republicons #trumplicans #trumpcult #rethuglicans #cult45 #recall every republican #vote blue #media matters

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gwydionmisha · 5 months

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#Xitter #Media Matters #Moderation #Antisemitism #News #First Amendment

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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* * * *

92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced today that he will be stepping down as chair of his media empire, including both Fox Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel (FNC), and News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other newspapers. In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched the Fox News Channel with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances.

Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.

[Heather Cox Richardson :: Letters From An American]

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #quotes #Media Matters #right wing politics #Rupert Murdoch #Faux “News”

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