RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/the_media_sure_do_hate_democracy_when_it_doesnt_suit_them.html

This piece by Washington Post writers is reasonable in a lot of respects.  It decries super-majorities in most states that essentially run roughshod over the minority party.  This is especially true in states like California, New York, and Illinois, and I am sure it is true in Republican states. 

“American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.”

As the number of swing districts has declined, another phenomenon has become evident: Even in open-seat races, which historically have been more contested than those involving incumbents, the number of landslide victories by members of both major parties has increased dramatically. …

In just two states is the legislature split between Republicans and Democrats. In more than half of the states, the dominant party enjoys a supermajority, which means they can override vetoes by a governor of a different party or generally have their will on legislation.

Similarly, full control of state government — the legislature and the governor’s office — is the rule rather than the exception. Today 39 states fit this definition. The result is a sharper and sharper divergence in the public policy agendas of the states.

The dominant party has been able to move aggressively to enact its governing priorities. …

These divisions have made it possible for the dominant party to govern with little regard to the interests of those with allegiance to the minority party and often little accountability as well. The result is two Americas with competing agendas and values.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jack-smith-thinks-he-can-leak-evidence-but-trump-cant/

The media’s never-ending negative campaign against former President Donald Trump has always relied heavily on the exploitation of anonymous sources. Journalists position themselves as the idealists defending “democratic norms,” but there’s nothing “democratic” about anonymous mudslinging. That may be a Democrat norm, but it’s not democratic.

It’s also ridiculous for the media to pretend the Trump indictments aren’t shredding a democratic norm, or that they are somehow nonpartisan or nonpolitical. Trump’s Justice Department didn’t indict Hunter Biden in the last campaign. The Democrats — in Washington, in New York City and soon in Georgia — are doing that to Trump.

When special counsel Jack Smith sought a protective order against Trump after Trump made revenge threats against unnamed enemies, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer reported on Aug. 5 that Trump has “promised that if elected, he would appoint a ‘real’ special prosecutor to investigate Mr. Biden and his family, proposing to eliminate the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.”

So, if Trump does what President Joe Biden did, his attempt at revenge violates the norm, not the original weaponization.

Smith’s prosecution of Trump is so transparently and arrogantly political that he filed another motion surrounding the protective order, objecting to Trump lawyer John Lauro appearing on five Sunday news programs. Lauro argued Smith was seeking to suppress Trump’s freedom of speech.

Smith’s motion complained: “The defendant seeks to use the discovery material to litigate this case in the media. But that is contrary to the purpose of criminal discovery, which is to afford defendants the ability to prepare for and mount a defense in court — not to wage a media campaign.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/10/for-washington-posts-feared-pinocchio-fact-checker-forthrightness-dies-in-updates-to-biden-burisma-story/

For the second time in three years, the Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics – its October 2020 article undercutting reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, who was then vice president of the United States.

The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant.

That conspiracy theory was quickly embraced by 51 former intelligence officials, who signed an open letter dismissing the New York Post’s scoop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the Washington Post fact check were used by the Biden campaign, other media outlets, and social media platforms to discredit the information contained on the laptop in the final days of the campaign. The article, Kessler would later boast, was “one of the most read articles in our 13-year history” of the fact-checking feature.

But Kessler’s fact check has not aged well. Just last week Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, testified before Congress that the article was “not correct reporting.” Instead of retracting the article – as the Post did with some of its debunked Russiagate coverage – or running a straightforward correction, the paper has appended a series of “updates” to its reporting.

“The Washington Post and other media have tried to squelch the scandal of Joe Biden potentially using his high office to enrich himself and his family,” said a congressional investigator for a GOP-led committee. “Almost nobody is fact-checking these biased fact checkers, and they carry a lot of weight and authority.”

In his original article, “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer,” Kessler took the Biden camp’s word that the then-vice president never met senior Burisma official Vadym Pozharskyi on April 16, 2015, and didn’t even attend the dinner in question at a Georgetown restaurant. Kessler also expressed open doubts about the authenticity of the laptop. Kessler wrote that the New York Post stories “purportedly” came from a Hunter Biden laptop “supposedly” left at a repair shop. Quoting an author of a book on disinformation, Kessler also questioned the authenticity of the emails on the laptop. The specific email in question – the New York Post called it a “smoking gun” – was an April 17 message from Pozharskyi thanking Hunter Biden for the “opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”

“Officials who worked for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such meeting took place,” Kessler asserted, noting that it was not listed on the former vice president’s schedule and that it was unlikely Biden even went to the restaurant.

After the election, with Biden in office, and as more details about the dinner trickled in over the next several months, the Washington Post on June 7, 2021, appended Kessler’s story with a note that the article had been ”updated.” It linked to a revised version, which carried the headline, “Hunter Biden’s laptop: The April 16, 2015, dinner.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/the-miraculously-changing-narrative-around-bidens-involvement-in-hunter-inc/

The media are committed to defending the first family, no matter what facts emerge.

Rarely have newsrooms committed so much effort to protecting men of such little character.

As recently as just four years ago, the New York Times and other news outlets would have jumped at the chance to investigate allegations that the president and his son operated an influence-peddling operation involving foreign nationals. Every editor at every major newsroom would be barking at his staff right now, demanding that they look into whether the president’s son had, in fact, leveraged the family name in return for huge sums of cash, whether the president got a cut of the action, and whether the president himself coordinated quid pro quos with well-heeled foreign interests.

But that was then. Now, there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office. For major media, most especially the New York Times, there’s not much value to the Biden family corruption story, which alleges President Joe Biden conspired with his son, Hunter, to rake in mountains of cash from foreign entities in return for certain preferred policies toward their countries. After all, according to the Times, the story is old news. It’s also none of your damn business.

Last week, after yet another fact emerged suggesting that Joe Biden had indeed been involved to some degree with his son’s overseas business dealings, contrary to what he himself stated unequivocally during the 2020 presidential election, the New York Times ran to the president’s aid with the classic “old news!” defense.

“It has long been known that the elder Mr. Biden at times interacted with his son’s business partners,” the paper of record declared on Monday.

Is that so? This thing Joe Biden vigorously denied in the 2020 election has “long been known”?

Recall that Biden declared in the 2020 election, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.”

“And what I will do is the same thing we did in our administration,” he added. “There will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business interests] and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I’m going to propose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That’s why I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”

That same year, during a campaign event in Iowa, Biden insisted again that he had never, ever spoken to his son about his business interests.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said. “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be looking at Trump. . . . Everybody looked at [allegations that I spoke with Hunter about his overseas business activities] and everybody looked at it and said there is nothing there. Ask the right questions.”

Later, after it became increasingly likely that Joe Biden had, in fact, interacted with his son’s business partners, the White House amended, ever so slightly, the president’s earlier assurances.

“The answer remains the same,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in July. “The president was never in business with his son. I just don’t have anything else to add.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/jen_rubin_spews_tripe_about_florida_forcing_the_wapo_to_issue_an_embarrassing_correction.html

Talk about stupid.

Jennifer Rubin wrote a column in the Washington Post, absurdly claiming that Florida was so badly run and so “cruel” its residents were fleeing, basing her entire article on this errant premise, and forcing the Washington Post to issue an embarrassing correction.

According to Fox News:

Rubin published the column Friday in which she claimed, “DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’” Those numbers are wrong and the Post, in a correction on Saturday, admitting the column “mischaracterized” the stats. 

She originally added, “’That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,’ according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.”

The statistic she cited came from some dingbat at Business Insider who mixed up the inbound numbers of Florida residents with the outbound numbers of Florida residents — a pretty elementary error.

Business Insider had to correct itself the following day.

But Jen liked that first story better, so she cited that in her own column, going lemmings-like off the Business Insider cliff, and forcing the WaPo to run a correction — which kind of scuppered the entire point of the piece. They actually should have pulled the column.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/08/threads-mark-zuckerbergs-safe-space/

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, the people formerly known as ‘blue ticks’ have been threatening to flounce off. Twitter, they say, has become an unusable hellhole, rife with disinformation and proto-fascist hate speech. A great Twitter exodus has been promised once every few months, yet still they have carried on tweeting.

Why did so few of them ever leave Twitter? The main barrier has been the lack of a viable alternative. Twitter, for good or ill, has remained the world’s public square. But that could be about to change. This week, Threads, the new social-media app from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, was launched to huge fanfire. It has been explicitly pitched as a rival to Twitter. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, 30million users are said to have signed up.

Threads is effectively a clone of Twitter. It is a ‘text-based social app’ or ‘microblogging service’. As with Twitter, posts on Threads have strict character limits. Twitter’s retweet function has become ‘repost’ and quote tweets have become ‘quote threads’. Even the name Threads seems to be a nod to a ‘Twitter thread’ – a connected series of tweets, posted by the same Twitter user, to get around the character limit.

The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok.