Last month, Steven Nelson at The New York Post detailed the alarming number of Big Tech executives who are staffing the Biden transition and White House.
At least 14 current and former senior executives at major tech firms are in positions of tremendous influence and minimal oversight with access to the highest levels of our federal bureaucracy. That includes at least four from Facebook and the head of Amazon Web Services, best known for shutting down Parler.
It reminds me a bit of the Grant Administration — called the “Carnival of Corruption” in its day. Although everyone around Grant was taking bribes (including his VP, members of Congress, and nearly the entire cabinet) even Grant wasn’t corrupt enough to bring the likes of James Fiske and Jay Gould onto the government payroll!
Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone is bribing our leaders. Why would they have to? They’re getting all the power without spending a dime. The fusion of government and big tech is happening before our eyes. Are you scared? I am.
I’ll say much more about this in future posts.
Sharyl Attkisson nails it
This post started as part 3 in my series this month, “How fake is CNN? At least this fake.” (Most recent entry here.) Because of CNN’s fake Trumprussia story that they had to retract. And because of Project Veritas catching that CNN producer who agrees that CNN’s coverage of Trumprussia is “mostly bullsh*t” with “no proof”.
But V spared me the trouble, with his post earlier. So the news here is that Sharyl Attkisson, the wonderful journalist, has a new book out – The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote. Here she discusses it with Tucker Carlson:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q-qKwm5gL8[/youtube]
Attkisson: Democrats, Republicans and the media Establishment have exempted themselves from the normal journalism rules…because they see Donald Trump as such a big threat. They would say, a Hitler-esque threat. That means they don’t have to follow the normal rules of journalism in this case. I think it’s more of a threat to the system of favors, money and access that has been developed [with] the political establishment.
Carlson: So it’s not just a conventional left-right thing, where they’re liberal, Trump is conservative, they hate him. There’s something different going on.
Attkisson: Washington survives on a system…of access and money where people have spent decades paying in to certain politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, to make sure certain political hearings don’t happen, to make sure certain laws have provisions written in. All of the sudden, overnight, all that access they’ve bought, all the hard work they’ve done as lobbyists and so on, is almost worthless – if Trump’s reality of Washington comes into play. And nobody seems to like that.
…I liken it to the situations that must be in North Korea. If you have a TV and can watch the news, it’s gonna be a version that’s approved and put out by the State. In some respects, we are getting an artificial reality created by people putting out narratives…If you’re like me, there’s very little that I see reported on the news that I instantly believe without doing my own checking because so many formerly-reputable news organizations have been proven to be 180 degress wrong, not just a little bit wrong… reporters doing things that wouldn’t be allowed in journalism school, but doing them now with impunity.
How fake is CNN? At least this fake (part 2)
Just to follow up on part 1 about CNN openly staging a fake protest that they’d wanted, here’s a nifty list.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtP2wRyKiBs[/youtube]
Like all such lists, it suffers from being anecdotal and agenda-driven. And (in this case) badly mis-titled. Some (hi rusty 😉 ) won’t like it that the list comes from Cernovich.
But I’m interested in what’s in it. I have seen most of these instances myself, at one time or another. I think it’s silly to trust CNN. If people ask me why, here are some of the examples I’d point to.
- The time CNN warned that it’s somehow illegal for ordinary citizens to look at the leaked DNC and Podesta emails. (It isn’t. So, look all you want.)
- The time they had a camera man pose as a random guy on the street and broadcast his pro-Hillary rant.
- The time CNN lied that Loretta Lynch had “recused herself” from any decisions on the Clinton e-mail investigation. (She didn’t. She should have.)
- The time(s) CNN spread the fake “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme. (Shot of an entire CNN panel doing it.)
- The time CNN, broadcasting from a studio with blue screen and fake wind, pretended it was on-location in the Gulf War.
- The time CNN claimed that Muslim terrorist bombings in Europe are done by “false flag” right-wingers.
- The time Jake Tapper told a Navy Seal he was interviewing, that his all buddies had died for nothing.
- The time CNN let a guest claim that “rogue cops shoot black people for sport”.
- The time a CNN anchor expressed joy at Sarah Palin’s children being assaulted.
- The times that CNN edited #BlackLivesMatter activists, who were calling for rage and violence, to make it appear as if they were somehow peaceful.
- The time a CNN anchor praised a cop-killer as “brave and courageous”.
- The time CNN had 2 reporters in the same parking lot in Phoenix and faked it, split-screen, to pretend they were in different locations.
- The time they did a voter focus group and openly stated the precise words that they wanted a certain voter to say next.
- The many times CNN cut a guest’s satellite feed if they strayed too far from CNN’s preferred narrative.
- The guy they cut for mentioning Jesus.
- The time they cut Bernie Sanders after he jokingly referred to CNN as Fake News.
- The time they cut a guest for mentioning Wikileaks.
- The time they cut a reporter who started talking about Hillary’s negatives or “vulnerabilities”.
- The way that, when CNN cuts a guest who strayed too far from their preferred narrative, they pretend it’s somehow accidental.
The list is incomplete of course. It didn’t even get around to some stuff like:
- CNN’s Fake War Propaganda, like Bana Alabed.
- Their brazen shifts in tone for partisan reasons.
- Their eagerness to report anti-Trump leaks, even when said leaks are anonymously sourced and, well, WRONG.
- Their frequent reporting of fake/hoaxed hate crimes.
- CNN’s endless Fake News in 2016 about “Hillary is ahead in the polls” and “Hillary is a lock to win the election”.
And more that I could probably find, if I searched GP archives.
How racist is CNN? Possibly this racist
Here’s a story that I’m late in mentioning; in part because I never saw it on CNN. 175 people are involved in a class-action lawsuit against CNN for racial discrimination.
(I apologize, if you have problems with the Daily Wire link. On my computer, it’s OK with an ad blocker. But without an ad blocker, DW eats all the computer’s resources, slowing things to a crawl. The story was also at Newsbusters and Breitbart.)
DW says this story gets even less coverage than the 13 people suing Fox News for racial discrimination.
“The lawsuit against CNN, meanwhile, claims the company’s Atlanta headquarters is rife with racism,” The New York Post wrote on April 27.
Minority employees had to endure bigoted remarks such as “It’s hard to manage black people” and “Who would be worth more: black slaves from times past, or new slaves?,” according to a complaint by former workers Celeslie Henley and Ernest Colbert Jr. filed in Atlanta federal court.
Colbert Jr. also claims he was paid thousands less than white colleagues as a manager at the affiliated Turner Broadcasting System.
Henley, a former CNN executive assistant, says she was fired in 2014 for complaining that black employees were being paid less than white counterparts.
Writes The Hollywood Reporter: Unlike the lawsuit against Fox News, the one against CNN and sister companies is much broader, claiming among other things that African-Americans receive lower performance ratings in evaluations, that there are dramatic differences in pay between similarly situated employees of different races and that the promotion of African-American employees is blocked by a “glass ceiling.”…
According to The New York Post, The New York Times is also being sued for racial discrimination:
The Times plaintiffs claim in a suit filed last year by New York lawyer Douglas Wigdor that “the Gray Lady” prefers to hire white employees to help target a white audience.
“Unbeknownst to the world at large, not only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family) to draw that purported ideal customer,” a complaint states.
Staffers from the staid broadsheet charge that Times CEO Mark Thompson, hired in 2012, created an “environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender.”
These stories are from April and May. If you know anything more recent, please update us in the comments.
How fake is CNN? At least this fake
CNN carefully stages some “good” Muslim demonstrators:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb5PPnuu3bs[/youtube]
CNN thinks it did nothing wrong or unusual.
The group of demonstrators that was at the police cordon was being allowed through by officers so they could show their signs to the gathered media. The CNN crew along with other media present simply filmed them doing so.
First of all – NO. Believe your own eyes, watch the video! CNN poses and directs the people in the shot. CNN doesn’t “simply film” them.
Second, is it normal for CNN to pick and choose which tiny group of demonstrators they will over-report on, to fit CNN’s pre-determined political script? I think they’re saying it is.
Their refutation doesn’t refute. CNN fakes a non-event, then explains in essence, “Oh that’s what we normally do. What’s the problem?”
UPDATE: There’s also that time Don Lemon posed his own co-worker as a random, man-on-the-street Hillary supporter (though Lemon disclosed it afterward).
The CNN reporter propaganda artist above is Becky Anderson. Her piece makes a point that we all WISH were true: Large numbers of Muslims rejecting the terrorist losers. Too bad it isn’t.
More Obama-NSA abuses
Yet another story that should be all over the media, but I haven’t seen it much. (If you have, let me know.)
Why wouldn’t it be covered? I find that it reflects great discredit on the Establishment (both political parties, Deep State and Controlled Media). As I started to say yesterday, they have ways to decide what you’re going to hear about. For as long as they can, they will bury stories that don’t fit their agenda.
To review some background:
- Under the 4th Amendment, the government isn’t supposed to spy on U.S. people without a court-ordered warrant.
- “The FISA Court” is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 “to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” (Wiki)
Note, foreign. - But FISA Court hearings are secret and only the government and the court judge are present, like a kangaroo court. The adversarial system is abandoned.
- As such, FISA tends to be very lenient to the government. Over time, they have created a secret body of law that gives the government sweeping powers to do domestic warrantless surveillance under an alleged “special needs exception” to the 4th Amendment.
- One example – In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked a FISA order that requires phone companies to provide a daily, ongoing feed of everyone’s phone call data to the NSA. Super invasive!
- Even so, FISA isn’t toothless and doesn’t approve everything – as you shall see. They need to preserve respectability, at least in their own eyes.
- FISA judges are appointed solely by the Chief Justice of the United States. In this regard, Establishment Republicans control the FISA court.
That’s just background. Now for the news, as reported by John Solomon and Sara Carter at Circa.com.
Under President Obama, the NSA secretly conducted years of surveillance and searches on Americans that not even the secret, super-lenient FISA Court would approve.
The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community…
The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm…
The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.
The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.
Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.
Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.
The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true…
The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself…
RTWT. Naturally, the NSA is scrambling to reassure people that it has fixed the problem. Riiiiiiiight. And Susan Rice didn’t lie and none of the surveillance data was ever misused against Obama opponents or improperly unmasked. Riiiiiiiight.
To people who understand civil liberties and limited government, all this is a huge deal that shows how far out of control the U.S. “intelligence community” (Deep State) has gotten. Chris Farrell at Judicial Watch compares it to President Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus during the U.S. Civil War.
Where is the Special Counsel on this?
Or the media coverage? Bush’s NSA did some illegal surveillance in the 2000s – and in 2005, was duly slammed by The New York Times. A large kerfuffle. “But that was then.” It served the interests of someone powerful – someone in deep alliance with, or control of, The New York Times – to weaken Bush. Not so much with Obama, eh?
See the FISA Court’s declassified order spanking the Obama administration, here. By the way, note how large sections of the relevant law and dockets are blacked out, showing how the FISA system has created secret law that the citizens aren’t supposed to know about. That’s horrible.
Also from Circa: Comey’s FBI was neck deep in the abuses.
The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances…
Obama Administration Wants Complete “Biosurveillance” of Every Citizen’s Health Records
The People Who Brought You Obamacare and the IRS Scandal are now working on a plan to put every American’s health records under bureaucratic surveillance.
The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is currently seeking public comment on a 52-page draft of the proposed “National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018” (NHSS).
“Health situational awareness includes biosurveillance and other health and non-health inputs (e.g., lab/diagnostics, health service utilization, active intelligence, and supply chain information), as well as systems and processes for effective communication among responders and critical health resource monitoring and allocation,” the draft states.
But as long as this isn’t “telling me what I can do in my own bedroom,” liberals won’t care.
Capricious Enforcement: A sign of the times
One recurring tool of socialist tyranny is the capricious enforcement of unworkable laws.
He quoted the passage in making a point about the “capricious enforcement” which was an inevitable feature of the unworkable mess better known as Obamacare.
But two and a half years later, it’s evident that observation could just as easily have been applied to our byzantine tax code, our environmental regulations, and even laws pertaining to press freedoms under the Obama administration. As Dan wrote earlier today, the only folks who are surprised by any of these scandals are the ones who haven’t been paying attention to what has been going with our government since January 20, 2009.
In the case of the Obama administration, though, it’s not strictly capricious enforcement, but selective enforcement, always with a partisan goal in mind. The IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative organizations is appalling, but one would have to be naive not to believe, as ABC’s Trey Hardin noted today, that it wasn’t authorized by someone in the West Wing. Hardin observed (audio at the link):
I will tell you this on the IRS front. I’ve worked in this town for over 20 years in the White House and on Capitol Hill and I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that there are people very close to this president that not only knew what the IRS were doing but authorized it. It simply just does not happen at an agency level like that without political advisers likely in the West Wing certainly connected to the president’s ongoing campaign organization.
And it’s not just the IRS. Earlier today it came out that the EPA waived fees for leftist organizations and leftist journalists who requested information, but not for conservative ones: “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.” Yes, this would be the same EPA that has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant, making the mere act of exhaling potentially troublesome.
A coincidence? I think not. This is the same administration committed to picking winners and losers on most matters. Hence, it should surprise no one that while oil companies are prosecuted for the deaths of eagles and other protected species, the bird-killing wind farms are naturally given a pass. Clearly, some energy companies are more equal than others.
It’s the same with journalists. Just a day after the AP snooping scandal broke, the administration is playing favorites again. Jake Tapper has gained a reputation as one who can be counted on to ask tough questions of the White House with greater frequency than the reporters at most of the other lamestream news organizations. Well, today Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection is reporting that the White House played Jake Tapper by selectively leaking one e-mail with the apparent aim of creating a diversion in the reporting about the Benghazi cover-up. Jacobson writes: “Like I said, this entire diversion of leaking a single email out of a chain of emails to Tapper was simply meant to put critics of the administration back on their heels and to provide an excuse for White House defenders to throw around words like ‘doctored.'”
And so what else do we see today? Well, all of a sudden the administration’s lackeys in the press such as Hilary Rosen are now out expressing their sympathy for poor Jay Carney. I guess they’re afraid of ending up as the subject of a DOJ snooping scandal or an IRS investigation or a selective leak.
Which of these Presidents deserve to be impeached?
- It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
- A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
- A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
- A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
- It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.
No one to blame for Obama Team Misrepresenting Benghazi Attack?
Perhaps the appeal of Twitter is that often pith makes the point better than a well-crafted, thoughtfully argued essay. Last night, Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog, proudly produces pithy commentary on the events of the day linked this tweet from Ari Fleischer:
Highly doubt we’ll see as much scrutiny of the Obama administration’s altering the talking points than we will of the Bush Administration’s acceptance of such points.
Odd how some accused Bush of lying for accepting the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in his office and not in the erring agency.
Interesting how so few bother to inquire into the Obama administration’s decision to alert the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in the ether for the erring administration officials.