National Park closures during 2013 government shutdown
Today, Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed to end the federal government shutdown (known as the “Trump Shutdown”) and keep government running until February 8, by which time Congress hopes to vote on a new long-term spending bill. In return for their agreement, Democrats got a six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that Congressional Republicans had let expire last September. Furthermore, the agreement includes a promise by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold a vote on codifying the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which Donald Trump ended last September. The agreement can be seen as a net win for Democrats, and they should portray it as such.
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U.S. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota
Following increasing pressure by Congressional Democrats over allegations of sexual impropriety, U.S. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota announced his resignation yesterday. Democratic pressure put only or primarily on Franken (as well as Democratic U.S. House Rep. John Conyers) to resign is a politically grave mistake. At a critical time in history for America, the Democrats are now in a circular firing squad, setting themselves up for defeats of their own making.
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Leave a comment! Tags: Affordable Care Act, Al Franken, Bill Clinton, Blake Farenthold, David Vitter, Democrats, Donald Trump, Fox News, John Conyers, Leeann Tweeden, Obamacare, Republicans, Roy Moore, Trent Franks, U.S. Senate
Suspected Trump/Russia connections
Donald Trump has spent much of this year attacking mainstream (non-Murdoch) news media outlets, calling them “fake news.” The term apparently means real news that isn’t flattering to Trump. This can be seen as a strategy to influence us not to believe what we see, hear and read, unless it comes from a pro-Trump media outlet like Fox News. But now Trump seems to have taken his propaganda strategy one step further: he is saying that the “Access Hollywood” tape released in October 16, in which Trump tells host Billy Bush that he likes to “just start kissing women” and “grab them by the pu*sy. You can do anything” is not authentic. What’s going on?
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Leave a comment! Tags: Access Hollywood, Billy Bush, CNN, Donald Trump, Fake News, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, Kompromat, news, Russia, Steele Dossier, Trump, Vladimir Putin
NASA astronauts John Glenn (C), Alan Shepard (R) and Gus Grissom (L)
John Glenn, one of America’s heroes of the 20th Century, died last Thursday at age 95. Glenn was a highly decorated Marine Corps fighter pilot in both World War II and the Korean War, rising to the level of Colonel. Then, as immortalized in the book and movie “The Right Stuff,” Glenn was chosen as one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts, where he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. Glenn went on to serve four terms as a U.S. Senator from Ohio, and he even returned to space at age 77, the oldest person ever to do so. In between, Glenn ran for president in the 1984 Democratic Party primaries.
What do all of John Glenn’s heroic accomplishments have in common? They were all done as part of the U.S. Government.
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NBC’s Matt Lauer with former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders
Wednesday night’s NBC News “Commander-in-Chief Forum” has been roundly criticized. In particular, moderator Matt Lauer is taking the heat for his biased, amateurish performance. However, the NBC forum is just one of many examples of the U.S. Beltway media tipping the scales against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump in this election, and failing to do their job. One Twitter user even started the hashtag “#LaueringTheBar” to describe this trend. With the first presidential debate just days away, time is quickly running out to cure the problem.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2016 Democratic primaries, 2016 Elections, 2016 presidential debates, 2016 Republican primaries, Bernie Sanders, Chris Wallace, CNN, Dana Bash, Donald Trump, Fox News, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Howard Stern, Iraq War, LaueringTheBar, Matt Lauer, MSNBC, NBC News, Ted Cruz, Twitter
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders at unity rally in July 2016.
“Hillary Clinton is in trouble.” “The race is close.” Those are the types of statements we heard from the news media during the Democratic Party primaries between Clinton and Bernie Sanders earlier this year. In truth, the Democratic primary race wasn’t that close. Clinton won by hundreds of delegates and millions of votes, and her victory arguably came as early as the New York primary on April 19, followed the next week by the Connecticut/Pennsylvania/Maryland/Delaware/Rhode Island primaries, when Sanders lost by many delegates, which he failed to gain back thereafter.
Yet the mainstream corporate media did everything they could to create an artificially close horse race between Clinton and Sanders. One key tactic the media employed was to play up phony scandals against Clinton, play down similar stories against Sanders (his illegitimate son, he and his wife’s possible financial shenanigans, his failure to show his tax returns as his campaign had repeatedly promised, etc). Now that Clinton is battling Donald Trump in the general election, the national press are doing the same thing to make for a phony horse race between them.
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Anti-NRA protest
We have a terrorism problem in America, and it isn’t Syrian refugees. The FBI defines “domestic terrorism” as actions that:
- Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
- Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping; and
- Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.
Right wing domestic terrorist acts, such as the recent shootings at the Colorado Springs, Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic, as well as four arsons in 74 days at other Planned Parenthood clinics, meet the definition. The same can be said about previous politically-motivated killings and attacks, such as the shooting of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, bombings, arson and attacks on abortion clinics, the attacks on black churches and their members, the shootings at the Sikkh temple in Wisconsin, attacks on mosques and Islamic centers, and attacks on LBGT Americans.
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Republican Presidential Primary debate, September 16, 2015
If you are trying to decode the rather bizarre mainstream media coverage of the 2016 election, it’s pretty simple: The corporate mainstream media are reverse engineering the election to suit their profit motives, and maybe their political biases as well. Take a look at what they’re doing, after the jump:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2016 election, Bridgegate, cable news, Carly Fiorina, CNN, Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP debates, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush. Chris Christie, media, Planned Parenthood, Republican Party, TV networks
Dick Cheney, CNN’s go-to right wing apologist
In 2015, the traditional news media — what we call the Corporate Mainstream Media — have continued to move to the right, in some cases sharply so. These television and newspaper media outlets are no longer reliable conveyors of facts that Americans need to make decisions at the voting booth and elsewhere. We should ditch these corporate mainstream media. Instead, we need to become our own news aggregators.
Here are some of the many examples of the mainstream news media’s rightward drift:
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Protesters disrupt Bernie Sanders event in Seattle, WA
Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. A presidential race between two dynastic candidates, focused on sharp policy differences. That’s the campaign we were supposed to get. Instead, as of August 2015, we are getting the Entertainment Campaign featuring sideshow issues involving Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s the presidential campaign we should have expected.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2016 Elections, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cable news, CNN, Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP, GOP debate, Jon Stewart, media, Megyn Kelly, Republican Party, Republican primaries