Tuesday 19th of March 2024

feeding the chooks...

 

chooks

Last Friday, CNN sent a man with colored pencils into the West Wing of the White House to cover the news.

It was the third time in a week the Trump administration banned cameras from the daily press briefing, so the cable network sent a veteran sketch artist to capture the not inconsequential news of the day: The Senate had just released details of a health care plan that would deprive 22 million Americans of health insurance, and President Trump announced that he did not, as he had previously hinted, surreptitiously record his conversations with James Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

In our nonstop, high-resolution, streaming age, the sketches look almost comical — and indeed, many dismissed it as a stunt. Just when it seemed things couldn’t get more absurd, Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, offered this penetrating explanation for the sporadic prohibition against cameras: “Sean got fatter.”

But the truth is that the decision to prevent the press secretary’s comments on the day’s most pressing matters from being televised is an affront to the spirit of an open and participatory government. It’s especially chilling in a country governed by a Constitution whose very First Amendment protects the freedom of the press.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/white-house-press-briefing-trump.html

in this self-serving article, the media shows how lazy it has become. Rather than dig around the White House for the real news, the journos wait to be fed and complain that the fare is bland...

Ah, remember Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, an Australian politician who held daily media conferences where he joked that he "fed the chooks", established direct telex links to newsrooms where he could feed the news according to his "corrupt" government. It took some brave people to unstitch the blither...

 

get your popcorns...

“We’re going for the jugular of the mainstream media,” Project Veritas spokesman Stephen Gordon told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines with Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon on Wednesday. “We want to shut you down for the liars you are … every time you lie; we’re going to catch you in it.”

Get your popcorn ready: Project Veritas' attack on the mainstream media is underway.

“We are after you,” Gordon said. 

Project Veritas had embarrassed CNN not once but twice this week – and it’s only Wednesday. On Monday, the group caught CNN medical producer John Bonfield on camera confessing that there was no “big proof” of any secret backdoor deals made between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government prior to his election in November 2016, but the network loved the "Russia story" because "our ratings are incredible right now."

The story "could be bullshit," Bonifield said. After all, as long as ratings – and advertising revenue – is up, who cares about the truth?

CNN Worldwide CEO Jeff Zucker informed the network at an internal meeting that its day-and-half spent covering the Paris Climate Accord was admirable, "But we’re done with it, let’s get back to Russia," Zucker said according to Bonifield’s recollection

When CNN’s credibility was doubted, writers at The New York Times and The Washington Post quickly rose to the network’s defense. Bonifield is merely a producer for CNN’s Medical Unit, and as such there’s no way he could know about the network’s political coverage as a whole, New York Times writer Sopan Deb wrote.

The Washington Post critiqued James O’Keefe and Project Veritas in a similar vein. "It never mentions that Bonifield is a producer of health and medical stories, raising questions about how relevant his views are, and how informed he is, about CNN’s political coverage," Post writer Paul Fahri noted Wednesday.

Project Veritas predicted the mainstream media rebuttals from a mile away. "We knew they were going to come back today," Gordon, a communications strategist with the organization, said on Wednesday’s episode of Fault Lines.

"The Washington Post came back at us," said Gordon. So Project Veritas decided to expose an equally embarrassing moment featuring former Obama administration adviser Van Jones. 

The "Russia thing is just a big nothing burger," Jones said. "There’s nothing there you can do."

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201706291055066672-project-veritas-war-on-...

fact free diet...

 

From The Gadfly

 

Data journalism is all the rage and The New York Times has done an excellent job documenting with colourful diagrams the Pussy Grabber’s lies and falsehoods since his inauguration. 

In January there were seven outright lies, February was a peak month with 13 lies, March had 11, April also 11, May seven and for June there were four. 

February was a month where there were no days without lies or falsehoods. In fact for the first 40 days of his presidency a day didn’t pass without a lie or falsehood. Since then he has said something untrue on at least 74 of 113 days. On the days without something untrue he is absent from Twitter, on holidays at Mar-a-Lago or golfing. 

The lies are fairly clear-cut: “I wasn’t a big fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq.” (He was for an invasion before he was against it.) “Between three million and five million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” (There’s no evidence of illegal voting.) “I have been on the cover of Time magazine 14 or 15 times – the all-time record.” (Trump was on the cover 11 times and Richard Nixon 55 times.) “I want to help our miners while the Democrats are blocking their healthcare.” (The bill to extend health benefits for certain coalminers was introduced by a Democrat and was co-sponsored by mostly Democrats.) Etc etc. 

The Times notes that while every president has shaded the truth, or told occasional whoppers, no other president has set out to convert reality into irrelevance. 

Falsehoods are in a broader category, such as exaggerating military spending in the Middle East. The result of this veracity void is a growth in the American public’s mistrust of Trump, from 55 per cent at the time he was inaugurated to about 60 per cent now. During the same period, those who thought he was honest fell from 42 per cent to 36 per cent. 

To make matters worse, The Economist has published a survey from the Pew Research Centre that shows America’s global standing under the Grabber has plummeted.

In Australia there was a 55 percentage points change in confidence when the final ratings of the Obama administration are compared to the trust in Trump. The country with the highest loss of confidence in the US is Sweden, at 83 percentage points. The country that preferred Trump to Obama the most was Russia, where confidence jumped 42 percentage points.

 read  more:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2017/07/01/gadfly-we-shall-fight-fre...

Tips and tattle: justinian@lawpress.com.au

and in the red corner...

 

WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, plans to convene a team of researchers to test the scientific premise of human-caused climate change, he told coal industry executives on Thursday.

Speaking at a board meeting of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a lobbying group for coal companies and their industry allies, Mr. Pruitt said his staff had already begun preparations for a “red team-blue team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science, according to two people who attended the meeting but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The initiative, first reported by E&E News, is the latest in a series of moves at the E.P.A. that critics say is undermining the role of academic research at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health.

The idea for a “red team-blue team” exercise has gained prominence among those who play down the urgency of global warming. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, endorsed the idea in a Senate hearing on Thursday.

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in April, Steven Koonin, a physicist at New York University, proposed that a “red team” of dissenting scientists be established to critique major scientific reports on climate change. A “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut the criticisms, and the resulting back-and-forth would unfold in public view.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/climate/scott-pruitt-climate-change-red-team.html

 

Please read:

 

What is global warming?

 

 

a simple explanation...

 

 

 

 

dear donald...

 

 

 

incompetence and conspiracy mix...

 

 

the ignorant twat...

 

 

 

modern pestilence and kicking the rightful owners in the nuts...

 

 

 

can the last one out turn off the lights?...

 

 

 

the second original sin: taking another bite at the apple...

 

 

 

 

 

not feeding the chooks any more...

White House spokesman Sean Spicer has resigned, ending a brief and turbulent tenure that made him a household name, amid further upheaval within US President Donald Trump's inner circle.

Key points:
  • Sean Spicer resigned to give incoming communications director Anthony Scaramucci "a fresh start"
  • Sarah Sanders is named new press secretary by Mr Scaramucci
  • US President Donald Trump said he was grateful for Mr Spicer's work

 

While not a surprise, Mr Spicer's departure was abrupt and reflected turmoil in Mr Trump's legal and media teams amid a widening investigation of possible ties between Mr Trump's campaign andRussian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Sarah Sanders was named as the new press secretary by her new boss, Anthony Scaramucci, at a White House briefing with reporters.

Mr Scaramucci, a former Wall Street financier, was named as the administration's new top communications official.

A Republican close to the White House told Reuters that Mr Trump settled on Mr Scaramucci for the job on Thursday and met with him on Friday morning (local time) to formally offer it to him.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-22/donald-trumps-press-secretary-sean...

the chooks are crazy...

 

 

...

In the age of Trump, it is establishment liberals who suffer the most severe cases of this malady of myopia and amnesia, and there are no greater examples of this than the odious political comedian Bill Maher, and MSNBC host Joy Reid.

Maher, an avowed liberal, has been waxing nostalgic for a return to the glory of the Bush years ever since Trump came to office. Apparently Maher abhors Trump’s assault on presidential “norms” so much that he prefers the good old days when the presidency wasn’t sullied by Trump’s uncouth behavior, but only by Bush’s preemptive war, torture, and surveillance and Obama’s kill list, war on whistleblowers and his ignoring of Wall Street and Executive branch criminality.

 

Joy Reid, a devout Clinton supporting liberal, recently was quoted as saying that she has more in common with neocons like Frum, Boot, and Kristol than she does with those on the far left. When you embrace the muscular American Empire of Bush neo-conservatism, and the globalist economics of Clinton neo-liberalism like Reid has, you’ve really mastered the art of bad ideas. But at least Reid is not alone with her vacuous ideology, as nearly everyone else in the mainstream media, Bill Maher included, parrot the same nonsense that she does.

What I dislike even more than Spicer and Trump, is the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of those on both the left and the right in the political and media establishment who willfully ignore the moral and ethical depravity that infected the White House long before Trump ever did.

#StephenColbert announces 2020 presidential bid on Russian TV after a few vodkashttps://t.co/fVehtYjZIkpic.twitter.com/2uqm4f2Uss

— RT (@RT_com) June 25, 2017

 

If the institutions of “decent society” can be so craven as to exalt the deplorable scoundrels who were accomplices to the crimes of Bush and Obama, then maybe those White House veterans, like Favreau, Wallace and Frum, who benefit from that amoral worship of power should, at a minimum, keep their mouths shut and be grateful they aren’t in prison or at the end of a rope.

But former and present Trump administration staff like Spicer, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon shouldn’t fret about their post-White House careers. If they really want to guarantee themselves a high-paying, cushy job in cable news, all they need to do is convince Trump to tweet less and kill more. You see, in the eyes of the “serious people” in “polite society,” tweeting is horrifically un-presidential, but killing, torturing and spying in the name of American Empire? That’s how you get the keys to the establishment kingdom.

Michael McCaffrey, for RT

Michael McCaffrey is a freelance writer, film critic and cultural commentator. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he runs his acting coaching and media consulting business. mpmacting.com/blog/

 

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/403956-emmys-spicer-trump-establishment/

 

read from top...

 

spicing it upspicing it up