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MEDIA

Bill Maher on David Koch Death: ‘I’m Glad He’s Dead’ and ‘I Hope the End Was Painful’ By Rick Moran

SHAME ON HIM!! RSK

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bill-maher-on-david-koch-death-im-glad-hes-dead-and-i-hope-the-end-was-painful/

Bill Maher made his bones in the entertainment world as a comedian. He should have stuck with stand-up.

His monologue from Friday’s Real Time on HBO simply can’t be believed:

Fox News:

“Real Time” host Bill Maher minced no words Friday night regarding the news that Republican megadonor and billionaire philanthropist David Koch had died at age 79 following a long battle with cancer.

“F— him… I’m glad he’s dead,” Maher said.

“And now, some funeral news to report. Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died .. of prostate cancer,” Maher said during his opening monologue, sparking some applause from his mostly liberal audience.

“I guess I’m going to have to re-evaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.”

The HBO star joked that Koch’s family expressed gratitude that he “lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire” and that condolences poured in “from all the politicians he owned.”

“As for his remains, he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes be blown into a child’s lungs,” Maher quipped.

After briefly acknowledging the “harsh words” he had for Koch and predicting condemnation, Maher doubled down on his disdain for him and his brother, Charles Koch.

“He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades. So f— him, the Amazon is burning up, I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

Forget ideology. Forget politics. How does a civilized human being get to the point where voicing such sentiments is believed to be accepted by anyone in society — even political allies?

Thinking such thoughts is bad enough. Most of us would be ashamed of ourselves for celebrating anyone’s demise and hoping “the end was painful.” It’s barbaric. The words are disconnected from conscience in a way that makes Maher less human.

CNN Hires Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as Contributor By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-hires-fired-fbi-deputy-director-andrew-mccabe-as-contributor/

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe is joining CNN as an on-air contributor, the network’s media reporter Oliver Darcy announced Friday.

McCabe was fired from the FBI in March 2018 after the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed that he’d repeatedly lied under oath to investigators about his role in leaking information on the bureau’s Clinton Foundation investigation to the Wall Street Journal. The Inspector General referred the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for investigation and McCabe may still face criminal charges.

The 21-year FBI veteran maintains his innocence, arguing that he was misunderstood and tried to correct the record. He filed suit against the Trump administration in U.S. District Court in Washington earlier this month, alleging that his dismissal was “politically motivated and retaliatory.”

President Trump routinely disparaged McCabe as a political partisan during his time in the administration, often invoking his wife, Jill McCabe, who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in Virginia as a Democrat in 2015.

Netflix Debuts Its Obama Manifesto By Armond White

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/netflix-documentary-american-factory-obama-manifesto/

The media celebrate the arrival of the new ministers of propaganda.

This week’s widespread media blitz heralding Netflix’s broadcast of its first Obama-endorsed presentation, American Factory, was more than synchronicity. It felt as though U.S. publicists and journalists collectively exhaled their relief at finally regaining the bully pulpit.

Reviews of American Factory, a doc by indie veterans Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, were not reliable accounts of the film’s quality. Its lack of focus following a Chinese manufacturer’s takeover of a former General Motors plant in Ohio — a move that fails to relieve working-class anxieties but, instead, predicts job-market doom — didn’t faze flacks and reviewers. The media class saw Reichert and Bognar’s facile, generalized survey as a chance to take on President Trump’s trade policy; many jettisoned film critique to try their hand at economic and moral analysis instead.

Those in power have usurped the old bromide “speaking truth to power.” They now speak rhetoric to the masses.

This deliberate misinterpretation of American Factory was, in fact, amplification of the political design that, no doubt, was always part of Netflix’s game plan when it signed Barack and Michelle Obama jointly to an impresario contract. (The monetary figure remains undisclosed, but the timing of Netflix’s offer corresponded with the Obamas’ well-publicized $65 million publishing agreements, proof of the media industry’s enthusiastic support of the former White House occupants in their role as cultural influencers.)

The Netflix-Obama nexus is stranger and more significant than American Factory itself. Calling their curator unit “Higher Ground,” Netflix and the Obamas remind us of Michelle’s fraudulent 2016 campaign boast “When they go lower, we go higher.” What could be lower than an ex-president and his mate perpetuating a counter-offensive to the successive administration? Could Juan and Evita Perón, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu have matched the divisiveness — or such wealth and potency — implicit in that lofty moniker? The Hollywood-Obama collusion was first apparent when Michelle made an Oscar telecast speech in 2013.

Facebook censorship blocking conservative thought from the national dialogue By Frank Hawkins

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/facebook_censorship_blocking_conservative_thought_from_the_national_dialogue.html

Facebook has no pretenses about banning conservative thought.  Its censorship of conservative voices is not disguised.  It’s in your face.  The company’s arrogance shows that it believes that no one can do anything about it.  Or will.

I have just ended a seven-day stay in FB jail for an unspecified “offense.”  That means I was totally blocked from posting or commenting, even giving “likes,” on Facebook for a full week.  As a regular conservative Facebook-user, but still scratching my head on what exactly offended the people running Facebook, I was happy to be back.

As it turned out, my joy was premature.  To mark my return to FB, I attempted to post an article outlining the Obama-Brennan attempt to discredit and overthrow the Trump presidency.  It was the lead article on the conservative Drudge challenger, Whatfinger.com.  I don’t know that everything in the article was correct.  But the writer made a solid case.  There was no profanity, no violence, no personal attacks in the piece, nothing that could be regarded by any reasonable person as hate speech.  In fact, a lot of the story was repetition and summary of what has already been widely reported.  Bottom line: It was a well documented reveal on the Deep State and the illegal actions of the Obama-Brennan administration against Trump.

When I tried to post the story, a Facebook tag popped up that said, “Error. Your message couldn’t be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.”  What?  What “other people”?  Which Democrat, Squad-supporting progressive, Brennan ally, Deep State operative snowflake was it?  What was “abusive” about what I was trying to post?  In fact, what does “abusive” in this context mean other than that it is a conservative point of view on current events?  Nevertheless, that’s how FB explained that it were blocking my post. 

The New York Times Reframes History By Peter Kirsanow

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-times-reframes-history/

The New York Times’s 1619 Project purports to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

The Times, ostensibly a newspaper, wasn’t around in 1619 to publish the “first rough draft of history” for this period. So now it’s decided to rewrite it to its liking.

The New York Times was, however, around to publish the first rough draft of numerous other significant events in history. One that comes immediately to mind is the Stalin-era 1932 famine in which millions of Ukrainians died. The precise number of deaths (ranging from 3 million to 10 million) is lost to history, in part because the New York Times — per its Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty — reported that “[a]ny report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” The Times confidently informed the world that there was “no famine . . .nor is there likely to be.”

The Times got a Pulitzer for that titanic debacle and other articles that ignored  Stalin’s manifold atrocities. Maybe it should devote a tiny portion of its 1619 Project resources to reframing its    history of the Ukrainian famine.

 

More recently, Times leadership admits to dedicating the last two years of its vast reporting resources to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. An American president elected with Russian assistance. The Times got another Pulitzer for this travesty. Then the Mueller report issued. Yet another major story the Times could reframe, perhaps by training as much attention on the involvement of the upper levels of the Obama administration in the hoax.

The list of “reframing” possibilities is endless. But the New York Times would do well to correct its own profound mistakes and biases before rewriting history to suit its ideological imperatives.

Facebook Audit Results Rile Liberals And Conservatives By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/facebook-audit-results-rile-liberals-and-conservatives/

Results of a Facebook audit released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.

The eight-page report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl with Covington law firm in consultation with 133 conservative organizations, was inconclusive on whether the platform was biased in suppressing conservative views. The report, however, was written in a manner aiming to ease criticism of the company from Republicans and President Donald Trump, who often charge that the tech giant is part of a greater movement among large tech companies in Silicon Valley stifling conservative ideas on the internet.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

Hawley proposed legislation in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

The Missouri senator argued the Kyl and Covington audit was whitewash and far from thorough, as the report was essentially a compilation of interviews. “Merely asking somebody to listen to conservatives’ concerns isn’t an audit,” Hawley said.

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday. “Then Facebook should release its results to the public.”

Other conservatives have been critical of Kyl’s report.

Brent Bozell, the president of Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to exposing bias in the media, claimed the Facebook report released this week was “empty and insulting.”

CNN’s Wajahat Ali: White Supremacists Are “Coming For All Of Us,” Trump “Will Not Win” Posted By Ian Schwartz VIDEO

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/20/cnns_wajahat_ali_white_supremacists_are_coming_for_all_of_us_trump_will_not_win.html

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali is asked what if “the squad” — the four Congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — used the same “anti-Semitic trope” that President Trump did Tuesday when he said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal. Ali, a Muslim, said Muslims are with Jews and they will not be divided by race or religion.

“So, what I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points,” Ali said Tuesday on ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.”We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel,” Ali said of his newfound Jewish-Muslim brotherhood. “That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.”

Media Lies About Trump’s Comments About Jews Who Vote Dem Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274692/media-lies-about%C2%A0trumps-comments-about-jews-who-daniel-greenfield

THE PRESIDENT’S EXACT WORDS: “I can’t even believe that we’re having this conversation. Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this, even 3 years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel because of 2 people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these 2 people over the state of Israel? I think that any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Two House Dems decided to go on a trip organized by Miftah, an anti-Semitic hate group.

Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s since-canceled trip to Israel was sponsored by Miftah, an exceptionally anti-Semitic group that praises Palestinian terrorists and claims Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover. The organization also publishes Neo-Nazis and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And the mainstream media not only covered for Miftah and defended Omar and Tlaib, but raised a ruckus that the Jewish State had the temerity to deny the bigots entry.

Then Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib retweeted a cartoon by a bigot who had submitted a cartoon to Iran’s Holocaust cartoon contest.

Again, the media shrugged and looked away from their anti-Semitism, while celebrating them as heroes and victims.

But now, finally the media discovered “anti-Semitism”.

Trump Accuses Jewish Democrats of ‘Great Disloyalty’ – New York Times

Trump: Jewish people who vote Democratic show ‘great disloyalty’ – NBC

etc, you know the rest.

Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook My independent team of investigators looked into the complaints, and the company has taken action. By Jon Kyl

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-conservatives-dont-trust-facebook-11566309603

From the Ivy League to Hollywood and the mainstream media, Americans with traditional morals or conservative politics have often felt excluded from the country’s elite, culture-creating institutions. Facebook offered an alternative: a place to express views and share news that you couldn’t find in the New York Times.

Over time, however, many conservatives lost trust in Facebook, believing it discriminated against them. The increasing scale and complexity of Facebook’s content-moderation practices made matters worse. In 2016 Facebook employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in the news feed’s now-discontinued “trending” section. In April 2018 Congress grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about anticonservative bias, from blocked content to suspended accounts.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook asked me to conduct a survey to hear from conservatives directly. Following substantial public interest in the project and in light of policy changes Facebook has recently made, we have decided to share our findings at this time.

Facebook placed no restrictions on how I could conduct the work. My team at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP began conducting interviews in May 2018. We cast a wide net to include as many aspects of conservatism as possible—from organizations focused on Christian values or protecting free expression to those focused on tax policy and small government. We identified individuals, groups and lawmakers who either use, study or could potentially regulate Facebook, and interviewed 133 of them. To encourage them to speak freely, we told interviewees we wouldn’t publish their identities. We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018 and have been discussing them with the company ever since.

What The 1619 Project Leaves Out By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-1619-project-leaves-out/

“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The scale of the opening offering is massive by the standards of modern journalism: 100 pages (with a few ads), ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of original poems and stories from 16 additional writers.

But the 1619 Project’s effort to “reframe American history” requires cropping out some significant figures in African-American history. Perhaps no near-100-page collection of essays, poems and photos could cover every significant figure in African-American history, but the number of prominent figures who never even get mentioned or who get only the most cursory treatment is pretty surprising.

Early in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, she reiterates the important point, “in every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.” The name Crispus Attucks is mentioned three times, but he is, as far as I can tell, the lone black Revolutionary War combatant mentioned. James Armistead was a spy for Lafayette who had access to General Cornwallis’s headquarters. Back in 1996, the New York Times wrote about the First Rhode Island Regiment, who fought at Newport and Pine’s Bridge, and in a regrouped form, Yorktown. By one account, one-quarter of the American forces at the battle of Yorktown were black. The 1619 Project does not mention the Battle of Yorktown.