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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Why the Media’s Trump Lie Machine is Failing No one believes the media anymore. Daniel Greenfield

Every five minutes the many mouths of the media broadcast, type, post and shriek that President Donald J. Trump is a liar. After months of this treatment, more voters find him truthful than them.

49% of voters believe that Trump and his people are telling the truth. Only 39% believe that the media is.

The media’s war on President Trump isn’t hurting him. It is destroying the media’s own credibility.

After Trump’s win, the media came to the conclusion that its biased attacks on him had been too subtle and understated to connect with the “dumb” voters. So it decided to be far more overt about its smears.

The New York Times, which used to be the best at disguising its biases in the omnipotent voice of professional journalism, called President Trump a liar in its headlines. The media cheered this descent into naked partisanship by the paper of record. But it didn’t hurt Trump. It hurt the Times.

Headlines blasting President Trump as a “liar” are easy enough to find on the internet. The New York Times derives much of its influence from its appearance of serious professionalism. Calling Trump names made it hard to distinguish the New York Times from the Huffington Post.

The first time the New York Times called Trump a liar was during the election. Times editor Dean Baquet insisted that while Hillary Clinton might “obfuscate, exaggerate”, Trump was a liar. And when the Times printed lies about Trump, it too was no doubt merely obfuscating and exaggerating rather than lying.

The Times can’t call its own candidate who lied about landing “under sniper fire” in Bosnia, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland and being kept out of NASA and the Marine Corps by sexism, a liar. And yet it expects someone, anyone, to believe that calling Trump a liar is anything more than a partisan smear.

Before the first debate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Politico all ran stories accusing Trump of being a liar. The coordinated attack failed to accomplish anything at all.

The New Black Panther Party: Black Racism Personified Any “national conversation” on race must acknowledge the most taboo racism of all. John Perazzo

Editor’s note: Below is the third installment in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. Click the following for the previous profile on the Souther Poverty Law Center and Students for Justice in Palestine.

Founded in 1990, the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP) is a militant black separatist organization that promotes racial violence against Jews and whites. NBPP preaches a “Ten-Point Platform” similar to its that of its namesake – the murderous Black panther Party of the 1960s and ’70s – demanding such things as: “full employment for our [black] people,” in light of the fact that “the white man has … used every dirty trick in the book to stand in the way of our freedom and independence”; “the overdue debt of reparations” from “this wicked racist government [that] has robbed us”; exemption for blacks “from all taxation”; and “education for our people that exposes the true nature of this devilish and decadent American society.”

Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a onetime spokesman for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, joined NBPP in the mid-1990s and by1998 had become NBPP’s chairman. He earned a reputation as an inveterate racist and anti-Semite by characterizing Jews as “slumlords in the black community” who were busy “sucking our [blacks’] blood on a daily and consistent basis”; asserting that Jews had provoked Adolf Hitler when they “went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped”; telling a San Francisco State University audience that “the white man is the Devil”; declaring that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should “kill them all”; and praising a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters in a racially motivated shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.” Muhammad also advised blacks that “[t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.”

When Muhammad died in February 2001, he was succeeded as NBPP chairman by his longtime protégé, Malik Zulu Shabazz. At a rally the previous summer, Shabazz had openly called for a race war in which black young people would unite against the “common enemy” so that “we will see caskets and funerals in the[ir] community.”

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, NBPP promoted numerous conspiracy theories alleging Jewish complicity. NBPP officer Amir Muhammad, for instance, suggested that Jews had been forewarned about the terror plot and thus had stayed away from the attack sites on 9/11: “There are reports that as many as 3,000 to 5,000 so-called Jews did not go to work [at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon] that day, and we need to take a serious look at that.”

In yet another false claim, NBPP has consistently maintained that Jews were “significantly and substantially” involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

The Russian Conspiracy Theory Boils Over The Left camouflages a “rolling coup attempt” as a righteous national security push. Matthew Vadum

The so-called scandal involving former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn is 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Iran-Contra, Watergate, proof of presidential fascism, a cynical money-making scheme, and a pro-Russian spy thriller all rolled into one, according to the increasingly deranged rants of howling left-wingers and their truth-adverse confederates in the mainstream media.

Despite this relentless barrage of fake news and smears, President Donald Trump pushed back against the orchestrated campaign against him yesterday at what is sure to go down in history as The Best Presidential Press Conference of All Time as he gave the mainstream media the beat-down it deserves. (See transcript.)

“To give you an idea how Trump’s press conference went, afterwards, the press corps demanded a safe space,” Ann Coulter tweeted of the 77-minute long White House event, Trump’s first solo presser as president. “I wish this press conference could go on all day.”

“The public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” a ferocious, animated Trump told the assembled press corps. “Maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

“This whole Russia scam that you guys” are pushing on people is “so you don’t talk about the real subject which is illegal leaks.”

“The public sees it,” he said. “They see it. They see it’s not fair. You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred. And the public is smart. They understand it.”

“I didn’t do anything for Russia,” he said. “I have done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember with the stupid plastic button that made us look like a bunch of jerks.”

A mewling Chuck Todd of NBC was offended by the president’s conduct at the press conference and tweeted, “This [is] not a laughing matter. I’m sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American[.]”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have signed on to the effort to delegitimize President Trump.

Todd, of course, is one the members of the media out to get Trump.

He recently said the invented Flynn-Russia crisis is “arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.”

Trump’s Flaws Don’t Justify Illegal Leaks The leakers are not patriots; they’re saboteurs. By Jonathan S. Tobin

It may be tiresome and whiny, but there’s a reason President Donald Trump keeps reminding us that he won the election. We’re almost a month into his presidency and somehow we’re still discussing whether he should have been elected. The questions about his fitness were serious enough that many conservatives refused to vote for him. But from the moment he took office, the only relevant questions about Trump have been whether his policies are sound and well executed.

Instead, his opponents are still spending an inordinate amount of time telling us something we already knew: Donald Trump is not an ordinary president and the things he says and tweets are often offensive, foolish, and/or untrue. As he proved twice this week at press conferences, he can’t even answer straightforward questions about anti-Semitism and racism — the sorts of questions any normal politician would consider softballs — without treating the query as a personal insult and an excuse to rant about the press rather than say the few simple words that would put the matter to rest.

As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne put it yesterday, it is Trump’s “approach to leadership” that is the core reason his opponents are determined to “resist” his government and topple it. That’s why they regard the leaks of secret surveillance tapes and transcripts of Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador as not merely convenient but completely justified.

The controversy over alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians is worth investigating. But since the key point in the New York Times report on the matter was that nothing the intelligence community has discovered points to any collusion between the Trump team and the Kremlin, the leaks that brought it all to light weren’t some patriotic attempt to inform the public that Trump’s or Flynn’s loyalty was in question; they were an attempt to embarrass and undermine the new administration.

Those who point out Trump’s hypocritical response to the leaks are not wrong. On the stump during the campaign, he was positively gleeful in describing the e-mails written by John Podesta and DNC officials and published by WikiLeaks. But liberals have engaged in the same hypocrisy, screaming bloody murder about WikiLeaks while touting each new anonymously sourced revelation about the Trump administration.

The key question of the moment isn’t whether this is a president who offends the sensibilities even of many of those who would like to support him. It’s whether any of this justifies government employees’ efforts to take down a sitting president with classified leaks. Whether or not you despise Trump, the answer to that question must be “no.”

Writers such as Dionne have a right to think Trump is unfit to be president. But there is nothing laudable about the anti-Trump resistance’s moving from street protests to the offices of disgruntled government officials, especially those tasked with protecting the nation’s secrets. The willingness of the intelligence community to take out Flynn with a flurry of leaks ought to scare all Americans. In the absence of evidence that Flynn’s conduct was illegal, these leaks must be viewed as part of a policy dispute rather than as an effort to protect American national security.

The intelligence community is right to worry about Trump’s puzzling crush on Vladimir Putin and his desire to appease the Russians rather than to confront them. Many conservatives rightly share those concerns. But even if Trump’s coddling of Putin is naïve or worse, that doesn’t put government employees who use illegal leaking to hamstring his efforts on a higher moral plane than the president.

A day without women? By Anna L. Stark

If the “March of Parts” women’s protest in Washington, D.C. on January 22 wasn’t enough to leave you begging for eye bleach, apparently, the crowd of perpetually aggrieved protest organizers are gearing up again. They’ve hijacked March 8 (formerly known as International Women’s Day) and renamed it the “Day without a Woman.”

Aside from word salad gymnastics, organizers published a plethora of questions regarding their cause. Their litany is as follows:

In the spirit of women and their allies coming together for love and liberation, we offer A Day without a Woman. We ask: do businesses support our communities, or do they drain our communities? Do they strive for gender equity or do they support the policies and leaders that perpetuate oppression? Do they align with a sustainable environment or do they profit off destruction and steal the futures of our children? We saw what happened when millions of us stood together in January, and now we know that our army of love greatly outnumbers the army of fear, greed and hatred. On March 8th, International Women’s Day, let’s unite again in our communities for A Day without a Woman. Over the next few weeks we will be sharing more information on what actions on that day can look like for you. In the meantime, we are proud to support Strike4Democracy’s as National Day of Action to Push Back against Assaults on Democratic Principles. This Friday, February 17th, gather your friends, families, neighbors, and start brainstorming ideas for how you can enhance your community, stand up to this administration, integrate resistance and self-care into your daily routine, and how you will channel your efforts for good on March 8th. Remember: this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Confused? If the overarching goal is to rally women across the country into a cohesive and riled up mob of estrogen-fueled resistance, it would certainly behoove the organizers to clarify exactly what they are resisting. As a rule, keeping it simple always works – like when the crowd gathered in front of the Supreme Court building on the evening President Trump announced his SCOTUS nominee. Easy-peasy – the protesters brought along blank signs and, using markers, simply penciled in the name “Gorsuch.” The same can’t be said for the “Day without a Woman” planners. Nothing the organizers have offered up is simple, easy to understand, or coherent.

Diving into the murky mix, “Do businesses support our communities, or do they drain our communities?” The obvious answer is…what businesses, which communities, and do we have a plumbing problem? Serving a big plate of nothingburger isn’t very inspiring and doesn’t give potential planners much to go on, if in fact large numbers of disgruntled and angry women will actually gather on February 17 to brainstorm. And what about those businesses owned by women? Or is the target of organized resistance directed only at businesses owned by men?

During the course of the brainstorming sessions, women are also asked to consider questions on gender equity (really? all 56 genders?), support for policies (policies regarding what and written by whom?), and identifying leaders (using the anonymous nondescript “they” reference) who perpetuate oppression.

It’s worth noting that no list of factionless oppressed people, groups, clusters, or subsets of the larger oppressed set was provided with the organizing statement. Also missing is a comprehensive list of villainous oppressors. Oppressed women have to be oppressed by someone, right? Surely, someone has a list?

Moving along and keeping up with the current politically correct groupspeak, women should also discuss leaders or perhaps companies (the reference is not clearly defined) that align with a sustainable environment, while tossing around terms like profit (the horror!), greed (a Pavlovian response in Socialist circles), destruction (maybe referring back to the environment?), and “for the children” (Progressive Liberal groupthink trigger words used to emit guilt). Surprisingly, the anthropomorphic climate change screed was not directly mentioned – unless, of course, “sustainable environment” is the adopted catch-all phrase to include the “hottest year ever” meme, which now occurs every year and will be officially declared every year…going forward. Or CO2 is bad. Take your pick.

Even the SAT Has Become Political The exam should follow dinner etiquette and stay away from controversial topics such as religion, politics and sex. By Trip Apley

As more than six million high-school students do every year, I sat down to take the College Board’s SAT exam on Dec. 3, 2016. The test was going well until I reached the essay question, which asks students to assess how an author of an article supports his claims.

The basic concept was easy enough, but I was surprised by the source our essay was supposed to be based on. We were asked to analyze a February 2014 Huffington Post article supporting the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act. The author: New York’s junior senator, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, who had recently introduced the legislation.

It wouldn’t be appropriate to have an SAT essay question using an article from a conservative blog about reasons to ban late-term abortion. And it is equally inappropriate to force students to focus their attention on a one-sided argument from one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate.

The exam made clear that the “essay should not explain whether you agree with” the article. It should only “explain how the author builds an argument to persuade.” Still, why would a controversial political topic be selected for this evaluation? Why a divisive, partisan issue? We would have had the same educational benefit if the SAT provided an article about banning laptops in school. Maybe the SAT essay should follow the rule of topics that are appropriate for dinner conversation: no religion, politics or sex.

The SAT is an assessment tool and not a mechanism to promote a political agenda to millions of impressionable students. This article might be the only point of view some students ever hear about paid leave, and they are required not only to read it but to restate its central arguments. Educators know that writing down facts is an effective way to retain information. Students should be memorizing algebraic equations, not arguments for progressive labor policy.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that College Board executives have an overwhelming preference for Democratic candidates. The College Board also spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that a prominent Democratic senator’s piece was chosen, but I’m not convinced. (A spokeswoman said that “College Board is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization.”) CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Picks Alexander Acosta to Serve as Labor Secretary Acosta would be first Hispanic member of Trump’s Cabinet; nomination comes after Andrew Puzder withdrew By Eric Morath

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s second choice for labor secretary, veteran federal attorney Alexander Acosta, has a potentially smoother path to confirmation than the controversial fast-food executive who came before him.

Mr. Acosta, who was named Thursday, has already passed muster with senators three times, winning confirmation under President George W. Bush for a position on the National Labor Relations Board, as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He has been dean at Florida International University’s law school since 2009.

Mr. Acosta would be the first Hispanic member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.
The record of public service by the 48-year-old stands in sharp contrast to that of Andy Puzder, the executive who withdrew himself from consideration for the labor post Wednesday. Personal controversies emerged after Mr. Puzder was picked in December, the most glaring of several vetting glitches the Trump administration has faced.

Mr. Acosta’s nomination is “off to a good start,” because he has been previously cleared by the Senate, said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), the chairman of the committee overseeing the confirmation.

“He has an impressive work and academic background,” Mr. Alexander said. “I look forward to exploring his views on how American workers can best adjust to the rapidly changing workplace.”

Mr. Trump announced his choice at a press conference in the White House’s East Room on Thursday. Mr. Acosta wasn’t in attendance, possibly a reflection of the speed with which the president moved less than 24 hours after Mr. Puzder withdrew himself from consideration.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Acosta would be “tremendous” in the job, noting his credential as a Harvard-educated attorney. Mr. Trump said he spoke with Mr. Acosta about the position earlier Thursday.

Many of the president’s nominees have faced contentious fights in the Senate, and several cabinet posts remain vacant nearly a month into Mr. Trump’s term. A less controversial pick in Mr. Acosta could signal the White House is anxious to win speedy approval and begin altering former President Barack Obama’s labor policies. CONTINUE AT SITE

Don’t Wimp Out on Climate If Trump doesn’t dump the Paris accord, his economic agenda is in jeopardy. By Kimberley A. Strassel

President Trump will soon turn his attention to another major campaign promise—rolling back the Obama climate agenda—and according to one quoted administration source his executive orders on that topic will “suck the air out of the room.” That’s good, but only if Team Trump finishes the job by casting into that vacuum the Paris climate accord.

That’s no longer a certainty, which ought to alarm anyone who voted for Mr. Trump in hopes of economic change. Candidate Trump correctly noted that the accord gave “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use,” and he seemed to understand it risked undermining all his other plans. He unequivocally promised to “cancel” the deal, which the international community rushed to put into effect before the election. The Trump transition even went to work on plans to short-circuit the supposed four-year process for getting out.
That was three months ago—or approximately 93 years in Trump time. Word is that some in the White House are now aggressively pushing a wimpier approach. A pro-Paris contingent claims that quick withdrawal would cause too much international uproar. Some say leaving isn’t even necessary because the accord isn’t “binding.”

Then there’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who in his confirmation hearing said: “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address threats of climate change, which do require a global response.” Those are not the words of an official intent on bold action, but of a harassed oil CEO who succumbed years ago to the left’s climate protests.

Here’s the terrible risk of the wimpy approach: If the environmental left has learned anything over the past 20 years, it’s that the judicial branch is full of reliable friends. Republicans don’t share the green agenda, and the Democratic administrations that do are hampered by laws and procedures. But judges get things done. Need a snail added to the endangered species list? Want to shut down a dam? File a lawsuit with a friendly court and get immediate, binding results.

Lawsuits are already proving the main tool of the anti-Trump “resistance.” CNN reported that 11 days into his tenure, Mr. Trump had already been named in 42 new federal lawsuits. John Walke, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told NPR that his group will litigate any Trump efforts to roll back environmental regulations. He boasted about green groups’ winning track record at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which Mr. Obama and Harry Reid packed with liberal judges.

It is certain that among the lawsuits will be one aimed at making the Paris accord enforceable. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell says judges could instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to implement the deal. “If President Trump doesn’t withdraw Obama’s signature, and Congress doesn’t challenge it,” he says, “then the environmentalists stand a good chance of getting a court to rule that our Paris commitments are binding and direct EPA to make it happen.” CONTINUE AT SITE

MSM fake news feeding frenzy to take down Trump By Rick Moran

How serious has the war gotten between Donald Trump’s White House and the government he supposedly runs?

Gizmodo – a website that deals with science and technology as well as politics – has launched a new site to encourage government employees to leak damning information about the Trump administration. TellonTrump.com is the subject of a massive advertising campaign on Facebook and will give government turncoats a safe and secure means of passing along damaging documents.

Wall Street Journal:

“One thing we know about Donald Trump is that there are a lot of things Donald Trump doesn’t want people to know about. If you’ve reached this page, you might have information about the conduct of Donald Trump or his administration that you’d like people to know about. Here’s how you can tell us,” the site explains.

The Univision Communications Inc.-owned media group, which operates sites like Fusion and the former Gawker Media sites like Gizmodo, Deadspin and Jezebel, started running ads on the social media platform within the last week that specifically target people who list certain government agencies as their employers. The ads don’t specify which news outlet is running the campaign, but the site which the ads point to clearly identifies the Gizmodo special projects desk.

“We are targeting people who are employed by federal agencies because we want them to know that if they see or know about something they think is newsworthy, we are here for them,” said John Cook, Gizmodo’s head of investigations.

Mr. Cook said Gizmodo is also working to purchase bus shelter ads near certain government agencies in Washington, D.C., encouraging people to contact them with information about the Trump administration.

Amazing, incredible – frightening. The German word that describes what’s going on is Götterdämmerung – a “cataclysmic downfall or momentous, apocalyptic event, especially of a regime or an institution.” Trump’s enemies are willing to tear the entire country down in order to destroy the president. The fact that they will destroy the presidency and the country in the process is regrettable but worth it because Trump is, well, evil.

John Podhoretz:

I am myself unnerved by the evidence of high-level lawlessness in the Flynn matter, but a “coup d’etat” refers specifically to a military ouster of a leader, not a leak-driven campaign using the press to nail someone. This is sure to persist, though, if the Flynn-Russia matter accelerates—and if the reluctant House and Senate do begin investigating the matter in earnest. If the language surrounding the investigation remains florid and purple, if Democrats try to please their Trump-hating constituents by screaming impeachment and liberal media tries to garner audience by jumping openly and vociferously on the bandwagon, the Trumpians will respond in kind by stirring the pot through their media and their argumentation.

A Climate Scientist Is Smeared for Blowing the Whistle on ‘Corrected’ Data The scandal is growing, as Congress investigates and NOAA brings in outside experts to review a key study. By Julie Kelly

Less than 72 hours after a federal whistleblower exposed shocking misconduct at a key U.S. climate agency, the CEO of the nation’s top scientific group was already dismissing the matter as no biggie. On February 7, Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told a congressional committee that allegations made by a high-level climate scientist were simply an “internal dispute between two factions” and insisted that the matter was “not the making of a big scandal.” (This was moments after Holt lectured the committee that science is “a set of principles dedicated to discovery,” and that it requires “humility in the face of evidence.” Who knew?)

Three days earlier, on February 4, John Bates, a former official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — he was in charge of that agency’s climate-data archive — posted a lengthy account detailing how a 2015 report on global warming was mishandled. In the blog Climate Etc., Bates wrote a specific and carefully sourced 4,100-word exposé that accuses Tom Karl, his ex-colleague at NOAA, of influencing the results and release of a crucial paper that purports to refute the pause in global warming. Karl’s study was published in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders would meet in Paris to agree on a costly climate change pact; the international media and climate activists cheered Karl’s report as the final word disproving the global-warming pause.

But Bates, an acclaimed expert in atmospheric sciences who left NOAA last year, says there’s a lot more to the story. He reveals that “in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets, . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming.” Karl’s report was “an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Agency protocol to properly archive data was not followed, and the computer that processed the data had suffered a “complete failure,” according to Bates. In a lengthy interview published in the Daily Mail the next day, Bates said:

They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did — so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.