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Roslindale and the prevaricators in the White House

Officer, knife and cameraman

Underreported? What's that cameraman doing at a BPD press conference on the case?

The office of Orbit Cinnamon Gum addict Sean Spicer is out with its list of allegedly "underreported" terrorist incidents, and it includes the June, 2015 incident in which an FBI agent and a Boston cop shot a Roslindale man to death before he could run them through with a knife in the parking lot of the CVS on Washington Street in Roslindale.

Underreported my ass.

Note that this all came about because the Vulgar Talking Yam claimed the news media was ignoring terrorist incidents (true, the media DID miss the Bowling Green Massacre, because, of course, it didn't happen).

Rather than admitting a mistake or a lie, of course, his palanquin bearers tried to shift the window and blame the media for underreporting terrorist incidents, such as San Bernardino and the Usaama Rahim incident and conspiracy.

I happen to know about the Rahim case not just because we use that drugstore, but because I was one of roughly a gazillion reporters who covered Rahim's death and the investigations and arrests that followed it.

There are 9,615 links on Google to accounts of the incident. The Globe covered it extensively. The New York Times wrote numerous stories about the case. The Washington Post covered it. And as you might expect, the case gave Fox News quite the foxnewsboner. But don't worry, ABC News covered the story, too, as did CBS and NBC. Even the BBC and the CBC made note of the case.

On June 4, 2015, Rahim's family held a press conference in the CVS parking lot. When they were done, a media scrum followed them back to their car:

Roslindale, June 4, 2015

Maybe Spicer should spend less time loading up his Super Soaker.

H/t Julie.

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Comments

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to amaze and disgust me. But I'm about equally disgusted with my fellow citizens who willfully swallow that geyser of horseshit and think it's manna.

(I think the word you're going for is "prevaricators", not "mendicants".)

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The word I should have just gone with is "liars," but, yes, if I'm going to aim for fancy, I should go with "prevaricators" instead of "mendicants," so corrected, and thanks.

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n/t

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That's the word I was obviously thinking of and somehow conflated it with "mendicants." Here are some other words I could have used.

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Adam, please tone down your vernacular. The people who are going to get offended by this don't understand those spanish words you are using.

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Seeing as even the 2015 Paris attacks made the list, I would assume that anything short of CNN's coverage of the missing plane would be "underreported"

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Some recent magazine covers:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jtuxuu3.jpg)

OK, so let's look at them...
Harpers: Resist the government. Ya, OK. Whatever.
Time: Dude looks like Soros. Just sayin.
New Yorker: Liberty has been snuffed. Must be Republicans in office.
Village: OK, Kill Trump. JESUS F. CHRIST. If that was a pic of Obama, they'd be raided by now. WTF?? I'll tell you why not...two reasons: 1. We're not that far gone and 2. Pence.
You want Trump? This is how you get Trump.
Der Spiegel: Ya, well, there are a lot of knife attacks on the Continent, so the image hits home with them. Just sayin...

The Economist: Actually hits close to the truth, but it's the Economist, so it's about, well, the financial system.
Business as usual in Washington is dead. Hey, I'm all for that.

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Plenty of reports that Trump had no idea that the executive order he signed had appointed Bannon to the National Security Council and (insanely) demoted the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence to non-essential status. And that Trump was pissed about it. Of course, our Insecure Social-Media-Obsessed Tween Girl in Chief will never admit he made a mistake there.

Trump is a dumb puppet, and white supremacist Bannon is pulling his strings.The Muslim ban has that racist asshole's fingerprints all over it.

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And they say so ... this IS OBJECTIVE REPORTING.

Sorry, but you've thrown your lot in with a bunch of people who have REPEATEDLY said that they PLAN to DESTROY our constitutional republic.

Either own it or quit whining about it being called out as extreme when it IS extreme.

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Yeah, this is from the people who ...

  • Didn't mention Jews in a statement on the Holocaust
  • Used the shooting in a Canadian mosque as "a reminder why the President is taking steps to be proactive, not reactive" on national security; but didn't delve into the fact it was a French Canadian guy shooting Muslims
  • Hasn't, as far as I can tell, commented on the mysterious fire in Texas that burned down a mosque.

The White House is just trolling people now

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This begs the question of what anyone who believes this is reading or watching. The sad answer is probably nothing besides Jeopardy and desperate housewives. If you stroll around the on line editions of papers and local news sites around the country in places like Columbus Ohio and Lanscaster PA you will see that national and international news gets almost no coverage ( it is mostly about local crime and politics) so that even if Trump supporters were seeking out actual news they might not even find it. That said if you even bother to turn on the garbage news like CNN or Fox, or read a USA Today (hiighest circulation in the country!), you would see these stories. Stupid is as stupid does.

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Why?

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Its a fitting thing for Trump supporters to be watching, as it too has been displaced by machines.

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https://twitter.com/newtrumptimes/status/828778861131358208

1. Tell MSM they ignore terror attacks

2. Triggered MSM lists ALL attacks they covered

3. People realize "Travel Ban" is necessary

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One of my favorite trigger activities back in the day was to blame Ted Kennedy for the deaths of both Mary and Jo Kopechne and how Ted only tried to save the non-ugly sister, eventually carrying her back to the party and hiding out for eight hours to make sure the ugly one was dead for sure.

Bowling Green Massacre... yeah. I recognize the skill.

The Trump administration is clearly antagonizing and expertly manipulating the enemy MSM. When the MSM employs such measures, they do it to fool their own loyal viewers for ratings and social indoctrination. Guess who always goes down in history as a beloved class act in such match-ups. Think of Reagan's awesome legacy vs Jimmeh Carter's ode to mediocrity. I have this awesome Reagan calendar right here next to me. I can't even recall ever seeing a Carter calendar. 12 months of a psycho bunny attack and a drunk brother are not exactly a marketable item. Amazon has like 14 different Reagan calendars and zero Carter calendars. My Reagan calendar has horses and guns and Gorbachev and jellybeans and falling walls and fired FAA strikers and cowboy hats and Alexander Haig and Nancy and the Reagan Ranch and everything!

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January: James Watt and HUD influence-peddling
February: Mentally ill people thrown out of hospitals
March: Archbishop Romero, dead at the hands of Reagan-supported terrorists
April: Cocaine smuggled by CIA, creating crack epidemic
May: Bonzo goes to Bitburg, calls Nazi Storm Troopers "innocent victims,"
June: Sponsorship of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban,
July: Dead AIDS patients, Reagan turning his back
August: America becoming a debtor nation
September: Perjury under oath, "I don't remember" 130 times.
October: Treason in Iran, surprise!,
November: Support for apartheid,
and my favorite page:
December: Reagan burning in hell

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Remember "Just Say No!"

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n/t

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Trump is claiming that there are terror incidents which are going unreported and is implying this is justification for him to make radical military and social moves if he deems it so. This is true 1984.

Let that sink in. Trump could claim there was an attack on a city which never occurred and use that as a justification to start a real war or arrest an entire group of innocent people. Think of Pearl Harbor with make-believe Japanese planes. He could claim a civil police force has been infiltrated by ISIS operatives and use this as justification for arresting the local police and replacing them with the military.

This is exactly how dictators rise to power and stay that way.

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Haven't you heard of the Bowling Green massacre?

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I died in the Bowling Green Massacre!

Adam, you are welcome to the t-shirt rights for that phrase ;-)

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Those who died in the Bowling Green attacks are eligible for free beers in every Applebees across the Southeast. (Excluding imports).

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Or did we find some weapons of mass destruction?

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Still looking for whoever it was that sunk the Maine.

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Notice they focused on events that can be tied to Islam in some way (e.g. no mention of white nationalist attacks). The administration knows these events were covered by the media and they know the media will defend themselves with archived images. This will achieve Trump's ultimate goal of having everyone talk about Islamic terrorism even when an attack hasn't happened recently. More coverage and re-showing events will trigger memories across the country and reignite fears. These fears will then begin to boost support for their cursed ban.

This is essentially psychological warfare and I don't think our country is prepared.

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These clowns are now trying to change history and seed doubt. "Bowling Green massacre is fake? Look at these incidents the media didn't tell us about".

It's drawing attention away from real issues and gives credibility to the Ministry of Disinformation. We need to keep calling them out on it.

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There is plenty of fuel for the president’s critics in these actions, yet Trump’s opponents — especially in the media — seem determined to overreact on even ordinary matters. This is both unwise and damaging to our political culture. -- Tom Nichols in the Washington Post

The real-world insignificance of the words "David Ortiz retires" garners 544,000 links, so yes, the 2015 radical Islamic terrorist incident in Roslindale was vastly underreported.

Kellyanne Conway's mistake of forgetting to use the word plotting (a massacre) for the radical Islamic Iraqi terrorists arrested in Bowling Green will generate more Google links than Obama claiming to have visited 57 states or defending "my Muslim faith" before being reminded of his "Christian faith" by George Stephanopoulos. After all, the Bowling Green duo admitted attacking U.S. troops in Iraq and planning to do so here, but Conway is the villian. Here's hoping the media keeps overreacting to Trump, it only helps the cause. For that, we are grateful.

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You have to stretch so hard to make these crazy connections that we should call you Armstrong!

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Adam, some of your links do not work:

9,615 links on Google
Washington Post
NBC

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you are dumb enough to swallow that load of bollocks, Fish. (And I've been reading your posts here for a while, so I had to consider that you might be for a minute.)

She said "Bowling Green Massacre" multiple times, to multiple interviewers, with the obvious intent of scaring the gullible, stupid, and too-lazy-to-fact-check citizenry into believing in the existence of a terrorist attack that never happened.

You can pretend that wasn't what she was doing. But that requires you to believe she just made an innocent mistake in using that phrase repeatedly to describe two Iraqi refugees living in Bowling Green who got sent to prison for trying to send money overseas to fund extremists.

Yes, easy to see how one would reach for the phrase "Bowling Green Massacre" in describing that. "I just donated to the NRA!" "No kidding? Where do I sign up for the NRA Massacre?"

Reading people like you trying to defend this woman is like watching a little kid trying to fib about where the cookies went when he's covered with crumbs. It's so ridiculous and inept, it's kind of funny. Except that your kind of naivety and/or complicity in this kind of lying undermines our democratic values, which isn't funny at all.

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^^^ is obviously a fan of Breitbart and Infowars "news."

Seriously go on these pages - this is what some of the people in this country read for news. It's sad that they don't even know they are being used and taken advantage of.

It's even sadder that people will not take the time to take outrageous "facts" and do a little research on whether or not the pussy grabbing headline is actually based on anything real.

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Because the other options(ABC, CBS, CNN, NYT WaPo) are just as honest. Some real good journalism here!

-Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates
After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.

Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.

At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.

At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”

She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.

-November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory
On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”

The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.

It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.

-December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Wellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Wellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Wellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

-January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

-January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.

To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.

-January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”

-January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.

How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).

The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.

Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.

-January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.

The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.

There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).

More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.

As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

-January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.

The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.

-January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.

-January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

-January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”

Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.

The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.

There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

-February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”

Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Lurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

-February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.

A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.

At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.

In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”

-February 2: Renaming Black History Month
At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.

The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

-February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures
On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.

The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).

Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).

The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)

As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.

The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.

As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”

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Or do you just do your own all the time?

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...worth a thousand words...so, I'll spare you the other nineteen thousand.
THIS is why people don't trust the media. They're so hell bent to discredit Trump, they piss all over themselves.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/LXa5VrP.jpg)

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over it.

If 20,000 words in a uHub post is your idea of getting your message of "OMG, the MSM it SUX!" across, I have some bad news for you about that manifesto you wrote in your own blood on deer hides way out in the woods.

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So this commenter has no original thought, they are just regurgitating alternative facts.

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There is it! I was waiting for someone to discredit the source... cause that's what you libs do. And also typical, can refute the facts above just discredit them as "alternative." Ironically, you offer no original thought either.

Since you know the source, what don't read the article. And click on every hyperlinked article/tweet they include. Since you apparently know all the facts, prove the Federalist wrong. My guess is you won't cause you're lazy...

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But by all means if you'd like to summarize your points I'll take a crack at them. As for suicides, I don't recall hearing about that after the election but the suicide prevention hotline DID record an uptick in the amount of calls it received immediately after the election. I would imagine most of those people were looking for attention or to make a statement, and not actually planning to kill themselves. What's next?

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Sen Chris Murphy was asking about policy, does Betsy DeVos think a solution to school shooting is to arm teachers? DeVos didn't answer yes or no. She said there's a school in a rural state that might need one for bears.

After the Sandy Hook massacre the gun lobby argued teachers should be armed. That's what Sen Murphy was asking about.

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Sen Chris Murphy was asking about policy, does Betsy DeVos think a solution to school shooting is to arm teachers? DeVos didn't answer yes or no. She said there's a school in a rural state that might need one for bears.

After the Sandy Hook massacre the gun lobby argued teachers should be armed. That's what Sen Murphy was asking about.

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Sen Chris Murphy was asking about policy, does Betsy DeVos think a solution to school shooting is to arm teachers? DeVos didn't answer yes or no. She said there's a school in a rural state that might need one for bears.

After the Sandy Hook massacre the gun lobby argued teachers should be armed. That's what Sen Murphy was asking about.

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"too long, didn't read; looks like a crazy person."

Because that's what 20K-word rants look like in a forum like this.

Any way you slice it, you're still cherry-picking. Legit media reports and prints hundreds of thousands of real news stories a day. The kind of sources that the Sweet Potato Stalin likes to quote are in the business of fabricating lies. One practices real, if admittedly imperfect journalism. The others are pure propaganda factories.

The problem with Trump supporters is that they don't have the critical thinking skills, education, and/or freedom from partisan blindness to acknowledge the difference.

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be CCD

get wicked upset when some guy with an agenda'd blog gets 13,000 retweets

get upset at 100,000 facebook shares

don't give a fuck when the WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY says categorically false statements to millions of people in an official capacity during a press conference

laugh about lib tears when the President Of The United States Of America makes shit up

wonder why people don't take me seriously

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so the end game is what, I post an an entire article from the Economist or the Atlantic of something? What a deeply pointless way to foster discussion.

The way to do it is to post a link to article and say something like 'hey, I think you should consider the points raised here' and maybe explain why it's of merit to the topic. You're no more of value than any other ditto head who can't think for themselves it seems.

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After all, this particular commenter's motto seems to be "Any link is a reference and any reference MUST BE TRUE if I BELIEVE" in it.

When he dies, he'll still be so lacking in rigor as to exhibit no rigor mortis.

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Lol blood and deer hides? You mean a computer? Actually it was cut a paste. In this day and age with fake news and the internet, its pretty easier to find story after story, discredited and ripped to shreds. This is also a good one:

http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/233053942-story

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/elderly-iraqi-woman-dies-trump-...

ps. i used deer blood to copy and paste those hyperlinks.

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I was comparing your post to a Unabomber-style manifesto, which is the kind of crazy that a cut-and-pasted (but unsourced, as though you dreamed it up yourself) 20K-word rant looks like in a conversational forum like this.

No worries. I expect it will surprise no one that you are as literal-minded as a child.

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Equates to national coverage.

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The New York Times wrote numerous stories about the case. The Washington Post covered it. And as you might expect, the case gave Fox News quite the foxnewsboner. But don't worry, ABC News covered the story, too, as did CBS and NBC. Even the BBC and the CBC made note of the case.

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Such bias- why aren't you also reporting on the emails! Oh the dastardly emails which would have shown that Huma Abedlin was secretly Osama bin Ladens daughter?

And what about the economic anxiety that just forced people to vote for white nationalism? Truly, the middle class, white people of the midwest are the real victims here.

Fish- over to you to flesh out these talking points.

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It seems that it is going to take this Administration a lot longer to master the techniques involved in producing the necessary conditions for successful Shock-Doctrine effects (see Naomi Klein).
As I understand it, subtlety and nuance are pre-requisites, not to mention the requirement of a cooperative and complicit media. These guys are off to a bad start when they are alienating the very same 'partners' who must join in the effort to induce fear among the public.

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I don't think this administration is nuanced enough, or has enough tact to put any 'plans' in place. They're just going to lie and bully their way to impeachment.

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I had the great pleasure of attending the SNL taping this past weekend and Melissa McCarthy is an absolute star. They didn't tell the crowd she would be there so that delayed applause was very much genuine.

As for the current administration.....they'll (continue to) shoot themselves in the foot to the point where they'll lose all credibility .to anyone who can think objectively.

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We can only hope. But they will take this country and those that voted for them for quite the ride first. We are going to have a lot of shit to clean up.

Dems need to grow a spine and become as good as the GOP about getting the message out there. And we the people can't get fatigued. They are going to try and get us tired. Or do something crazy in one hand so we aren't paying attention to what is happening in the other hand,

We need to make our calls, go to town halls, get people registered to vote and hold all of our politicians accountable. 2018 will be here quicker than we think.

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'If liberals are so g-darn smart, why do they lose so g-darn always.'

Dems need to grow some balls, stop being so politically correct, and leave the knives at home when they step into a gun fight. There was real debate, even Geroge W believed, whether we'd see another republican POTUS in the near future (W's lifetime was his belief). But we all forgot that they gerrymandered their way into 37 or so governerships, countless local seats, and by the looks of it the senate, congress, and the presidency as well.

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Lose?

Having vastly better schools, health care, quality of life, elder health, poverty rates, low rates of teen pregnancy, etc. etc. etc. than the Red States that suck our tax money and then lecture us about spending is "losing"?

Go ahead and "win" then.

Sucker.

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Facts. Republicans run the senate and the house. Facts. Not to mention the presidency. Not sure why you made a blue state vs red state argument, but then again I don't understand a lot of the points you make on here. The jury's still out on you Swrrly.

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MA is nowhere near run by Republicans.

You and your trumploving friends need to get past the misconception that the chief exec is the government.

You can start by reading all the founding documents for this country where they are very careful to make certain of checks, balances, and other controls on chief execs even thinking they run the government.

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You actually made me laugh out loud with that one. I'm no where near a Trump supporter, voter, nor lover. And no one I know supports him either. Again, we're talking facts. If memory serves me correctly there are 37 current R governors in these United States. Since 37 is more than half of 50, my statement is factually true. When did I say Mass was run by republicans? My point was democrats need to man up and stop playing nice when republicans are playing dirty, IE gerrymandering districts to win a lot of those seats.

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issue invented by Republicans to defend their voter-suppression efforts (which also need to be fought vigorously), but gerrymandering is a much bigger problem.

Give the GOP credit for cleverly gaming the system, but it is a rigged system. Dems get many more votes than Repubs in Congressional elections, still don't control Congress. They don't have to redraw the lines to give themselves an unfair advantage, just remove the artificiality of the current district maps. Fixing that means working at the state level in advance of 2020 to level the playing field.

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that one's pretty good.

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