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Recent Appearances...

-Great Cultural Revolution

Among the media watchdogs, NewsGuard, which often targets conservative outlets, is most feared

2024-11-28

Long. Informative. Something to read with your hurried morning coffee before you start all the Thanksgiving things — if you’re hosting — or to enjoy over your leisurely breakfast if someone else has the responsibility. ;-)

[JustTheNews] Part of President-elect Donald’s Trump plan to rein in censorship, which he disclosed on Nov. 9, involves tweaking section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230 gives social media companies liability immunity for user posts, though Trump wants it to apply only to those with “high standards of neutrality,” not just those who appear to routinely take down posts that lean conservative.

Without calling out by name Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a legacy media, Trump referred to “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media.”

Coinciding with Trump’s bold plan, Just the News has launched a four-part series exploring the media watchdogs who censor.

In the first part of this the series, we explored the Trusted News Initiative. In this second installment, we look at NewsGuard.

NEWSGUARD
Unlike the other media watchdogs in this series, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its ratings, dubbed “Nutrition Labels,” that search engines and Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, use to warn users against news sources NewsGuard deems unreliable.

For $4.95 a month, consumers can attach NewsGuard’s nutrition labels to all of their Internet search results, allegedly so that they’ll know if what they are reading is true or not, based on the opinions of the dozens of researcher/journalists the company employs.

NewsGuard discloses who those journalists are and their credentials in a bio page.

In the five years since its founding, NewsGuard has ingrained itself into schools, libraries and hospitals, and it has struck contracts with the Defense Department (though the company told Just the News it does not currently generate revenue from the government).

Among its products is BrandGuard, used by advertisers and the agencies that represent them, to ensure their ads don’t appear alongside news stories and at media outlets to which NewsGuard assigns a low rating.

Thus, it wields unusual power for such a young company, given that media outlets that get a low grade will most likley suffer a decline in traffic and advertising revenue.

Its claim of nonpartisanship, though, appears dubious, given its team of human fact-checkers rarely deviate from the legacy media’s approved narrative, and outlets that stray – often conservative ones – are more often than legacy ones given lower marks.

Thus, right-leaning outlets such as Breitbart News and the Daily Wire score Nutrition Labels of just 49.5%, while The Washington Post scores 100%.

That perfect rating stands in contrast to the august newspaper insisted for months – until after the election – that first son Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake; appeared to frame stories to insinuate that Trump was acting as an agent for Russia during his first term as president; and dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. All these turned out to be false.

Insiders at multiple media outlets told Just the News that many companies arbitrarily choose a 70% NewsGuard rating as a minimum threshold before they’ll consider buying an ad, notably just above the 69.5% rating it gives to Fox News. NewsGuard, though, told Just the News that 60% is a more common threshold.

The Nutrition Labels are based on several categories including: false or misleading content; how an outlet gathers and presents news responsibly; effective practices for correcting errors; avoiding deceptive headlines; the disclosures of ownership and financing, potential conflicts of interest; whether advertising is clearly labeled; whether the names of an outlet's content creators are disclosed and their biographies are provided; and how an outlet handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.

The New York Times lost 12.5 points in that latter category, depriving it of a perfect score.

“It’s nuts. They hold different outlets to different standards,” said one media executive who has dealt with NewsGuard. Indeed, media insiders pointed out that while the Daily Beast was penalized for reporting that Biden’s laptop was likely fake, more traditional outlets like The Post and The New York Times were not.

“It’s not an unbiased tool. It’s arbitrary categories with arbitrary weighting from people who think they know best because they were once journalists,” the media insider also said. “It’s terrible to begin with, and a shame it ever got traction.”

Just the News asked NewsGuard why, if the disclosure of financing is important, does it not take into account revenue from advertisers, given how often media companies are accused of bias in favor of pharmaceutical companies, for example, because they are the nation’s largest buyer of ads.

NewsGuard replied: “Simply receiving some ads from an industry that a site also covers, among many other ads from other industries, would not cause a site to lose points.”

NewsGuard told Just The News that it employs 40 "analysts" to rate news outlets. It wouldn’t say whether more are Democrats or Republicans, though an insider familiar with the situation estimates 65% lean left.

NewsGuard also argues many conservative outlets score higher than liberal ones, using as an example Fox News' 69.5% compared to MSNBC's 49.5%.

BULLYING AS A BUSINESS MODEL
NewsGuard also pointed out that co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a long-time conservative writer for The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and Regnery Publishing.

If a media outlet scores poorly, NewsGuard will tell it what to do to raise its rating.

Sometimes the advice is ambiguous. One media executive told Just the News that his outlet was informed that NewsGuard was “uncomfortable” with some of their opinion pieces.

“Who are they to say to say what our audience and advertisers should be comfortable with?” said the executive, who chose to remain unnamed. “It’s like they saw a space to launch a company to bully conservative news sites and promote the ones they like. They don’t look at every story, they pull out the ones they disagree with to downgrade your newsroom.”

NewsGuard said its criteria is based on “apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” and that it was founded as “an alternative to government censorship or the continued dominance of the secret ratings of news publishers by the social media companies and left-wing advocacy groups.”

But conservatives don’t buy it, hence a House Judiciary Committee report criticized the company for its stories that correctly reported that a Gaza hospital explosion was due to a misfired Hamas rocket but not penalizing outlets that falsely reported that Biden’s laptop was "Russian disinformation." (NewsGuard penalized the Daily Beast until it corrected its reporting, two months after The New York Times and Washington Post, which were not penalized, corrected theirs).

One interesting aside is that retired General Michael Hayden, who in 2020 along with 50 other former security operatives signed the now-infamous and debunked statement positing the Biden laptop as fake, serves as an "advisor" to the board of NewsGuard. A congressional report indicated that the statement was drafted and circulated by then Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken.

GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA
Republicans also held a hearing on July 10 to explore possibe collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, another watchdog accused of censorship that was sued by X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble in August and folded a few days later.

At the hearing this summer, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro testified that NewsGuard “has penalized us openly for being a conservative site. When we mention that we are actually honest about our bias, what they said is, ‘Well, that means you are not objective,’ as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective but actually are biased toward the left.”

As first reported by Newsmax, on Nov. 13, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote a letter about NewsGuard to the CEOs of Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube); Meta (the parent of Facebook and Instagram); Microsoft; and Apple.

Just as Trump referenced how tech companies risk liability protection under Section 230 if they don’t act in good faith by allowing diverse viewpoints, so does Carr, whom Trump has picked to lead the agency.

But the major point of his letter, reviewed by Just the News, is to seek intel on how the four major tech companies employ “the Orwellian named NewsGuard,” as Carr put it.

“NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” writes Carr, pointing to a report from the conservative Media Research Center. The report includes that NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steven Brill went on CNBC in 2020 to claim the laptop story was probably a Russian hoax.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Why Veterans Really Hate Liz Cheney And Kamala Harris

2024-11-08

[THEFEDERALIST] The recent controversy regarding Donald Trump
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
's criticism of Liz Cheney as a warhawk who has never faced the dangers of the wars she embraces has synthesized an issue that may be opaque to non-veterans: the extreme resentment many veterans of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) feel toward Kamala Harris
former senatrix from California, 2020 Dem presidential hopeful and ultimately Joe Biden's intended successor
and the Democrat Party.

Harris and the Democrats

...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy, white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
have created a perfect storm of veteran disdain in that they have succeeded in uniting three once-inapposite groups behind Harris: the neocons who started the GWOT, the media and Democrats who undermined the veterans' GWOT missions, and the generals who failed again and again and again at bringing the GWOT to a successful conclusion.

If you want to understand the prevailing veteran rage against Harris and love for Trump, you need to understand this unholy trinity that so many veterans loathe.

I'll start with the neocon ''chickenhawks.'' Maybe it's not fair to blame Liz Cheney for the GWOT as her father was its prime architect and not Liz herself, but she has come to serve as a symbol of the many advocates for useless, endless wars who never put their own lives (or the lives of their children) on the line, and who now support Kamala Harris. Liz Cheney stands as a symbol in this regard, and she stands for the many establishment Republicans who would rather support a radical Democrat than the only president in decades who did not start new wars.

These are neocons like Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Bill Kristol, and the infamous 200-plus Republican former staffers for George W. Bush, Willard Mitt Romney, aka Pierre Delecto
...former governor of Massachussetts, the Publican nominee for president in 2012, now Senator from Utah. He is the son of the former governor of Michigan, George Romney, who himself ran for president after saving American Motors from failure, though not permanently. Romney has a record as a successful businessman, heading Bain Capital, and he rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics from the midst of bribery and mismanagement scandals. He is currently a trans Republican and a member in good standing of the Never Trump Party, attempting to assume the mantle of the late John McCain...
, and

John Maverick McCain
... the Senator-for-Life from Arizona, former presidential candidate and even more former foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. As an ordinary citizen he greased the infamous hookers peeing on the Obamabed in Moscow dossier in an attempt to smear President Trump...
who helped design the GWOT. These are the people who put GWOT veterans into the cauldron that left them and so many of their friends dead, maimed, or bearing invisible scars that linger even today.

I served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. I was committed to our missions when I was there, and I know we did great good for so many citizens of those two countries. But in the end — given how those wars ended — I have to admit it was all for naught. Defeating al Qaeda and bin Laden in Afghanistan was the one mission that actually mattered, and the rest of what we did in those two wars was, sadly, a waste of time, money, and lives.

To have the architects of those useless, endless wars now turn on the one president who really cared about not squandering our lives feels like an injustice. Many of us stood by those neocons — even defended them in our private lives against slanderous lies — and now they turn on us by opposing the one man who vows that these sorts of wars will end. It is painful and feels like a betrayal.

The second leg of the unholy trinity is the Democrats and their media lackeys who helped us lose those wars — the same people those treacherous neocons have now allied themselves with.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
in Afghanistan both knew they could never defeat us in battle toe-to-toe. Our technology, our forces, our training, and our tactics were unbeatable. Instead, AQI and the Taliban adopted Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam war strategy: bleed the Americans dry so the folks back home would abandon the war effort. They knew that if they could turn the national will against our mission, America would quit.

They were right. Every IED attack was made not against the soldiers or Marines it killed or maimed, but against the folks back home watching CNN
...formerly the Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for...
. The ''death counts'' on TV were the ultimate goal of our enemies.

When I returned from Iraq in 2004, I was shocked at how disconnected the news reports were from the reality on the ground, and I was shocked to see those same Democrats who sent us to war now suddenly turning against our mission. The daily march of Democrats with giant Dick Cheney puppet heads on the National Mall and the endless chants of ''Bush Lied, People Died'' served precisely the purpose AQI and the Taliban intended: to break the national will. To many of us returning vets, it felt that our own countrymen were giving aid and comfort to our enemy, helping them fulfill that enemy's strategic objective. This too felt like a betrayal.

The last leg of the trinity of veteran betrayal is the generals who could not win those same wars, retired from the military and went deep into the military-industrial complex, and now endorse Harris and demean Trump. These are generals like Stan McChrystal, who gave us such restrictive rules of engagement in Afghanistan that it cost the lives of so many troops. These are generals like John Kelly, whose counterinsurgency tactics solved so little in Al Anbar Province and who now libels the boss who fired him in The Atlantic magazine. These are generals like Michael Hayden, whose tenure at the National Security Agency did nothing to prevent 9/11, yet who found ways to use that tragic day as an excuse to spy on Americans.

These are the generals who led us in wars that they were not competent enough to win. Their leadership failed, no one was held to account, and now these same men stand proudly against the one president who would not tolerate those failures nor repeat them. This too feels like a betrayal.

Three groups, three betrayals. So many veterans feel like I do — not all, but many.

Link

Home Front: Politix

America First Legal sues FEC to force action on Hunter Biden laptop deniers during 2020 campaign

2024-03-03

*Snicker* Alinsky ‘em good, guys.

[FoxNews] AFL Legal claims the 51 former intelligence officials gave Biden an in-kind campaign contribution by calling the Hunter Biden laptop 'disinformation'.

After the Federal Election Commission declined to act against Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for the laptop-denying statement by 51 former intelligence officials, a conservative watchdog group is trying to force action.

America First Legal sued the FEC in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force the agency that polices campaign donations and spending to act.

"The FEC decided we’re not going to act on this. So, what the district court will do, our hope, is that it will order the FEC to investigate and take this seriously," Daniel Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, told Fox News Digital.

In October, the group filed an FEC complaint against the Biden for President campaign from 2020, the Biden Victory Fund, the Biden Action Fund and the Democratic National Committee for failing to report indirect contributions from the later-debunked statement by the 51 officials released on October 19, 2020, just weeks before the November 8 election, and just days before a presidential debate.

The statement claimed without evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop was likely part of a "Russian disinformation" campaign.

If the FEC doesn’t act, it is "effectively encouraging disinformation to the public that may influence the election," Epstein continued.

An FEC spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the agency doesn’t comment on litigation. Neither the 2024 Biden presidential campaign nor the DNC responded to inquiries for this story.

The FEC has 60 days to respond to the lawsuit. Epstein anticipates the agency will file a motion to remand the matter back to the FEC for investigation.

In March 2023, former Obama administration CIA Deputy and Acting Director Michael Morrell testified to the House Judiciary and House Intelligence Committees that on October 17, 2020, then-Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken, now the secretary of state, contacted him to discuss drafting a statement to attack the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported by the New York Post.  Morrell circulated the statement among other anti-Trump former intelligence officials. The 51 former officials who signed on included Leon Panetta, John Brennan and James Clapper from the Barack Obama administration, as well as Michael Hayden from the George W. Bush administration — all vocal critics of Trump.

Eventually, both the New York Times and Washington Post verified the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop.

"Because Morrell, Brennan, Clapper, and the other signatories were supposedly ‘nonpartisan’ national security and intelligence experts, their public statement was a campaign contribution of substantial value to the respondents, who solicited the ‘Letter of 51’ from them for the express purpose of influencing the 2020 presidential election," the AFL lawsuit says. "Yet, the respondents failed to report the contribution and to identify the individuals who made it."

Link

-Great Cultural Revolution

WATCH: Libs of TikTok Creator Sits Down for Interview with Far-Left Activist and Writer Taylor Lorenz ‐ Wears T-Shirt of Her Crying

2024-02-25

[Gateway] Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik sat down for a nearly an hour-long interview with Taylor Lorenz, the far-left activist journalist who doxed her.

In a hilarious troll, Raichik wrote a t-shirt emblazoned with an image of Lorenz crying about being "harassed" online during an interview in 2022.

Libs of TikTok began by reposting shocking videos that leftists had posted themselves but has quickly become one of the largest conservative watchdogs defending children and exposing transgender ideology being pushed in schools, libraries, and children’s hospitals.

During the interview, Lorenz repeatedly tried to blame Raichik for comments made by strangers who follow her — but was quickly shut down.

Lorenz has been part of a group of leftists baselessly accusing Raichik of being, at least partly, responsible for the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student at Owasso, Oklahoma — because Libs of TikTok had posted about a teacher in the school district roughly two years ago.

Raichik has been at the forefront of removing explicit books from schools and children’s sections of libraries. She was recently appointed to the Oklahoma Library Advisory Committee.

While speaking at the cafe in Los Angeles, Lorenz admitted that she has not read any books that Raichik has opposed.

Link

Good Morning

2023-11-24

Ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden Smears Patriotic American Christians: %u2018No Different' from Hamas Terrorists

11/24/2023

Son of a Lebanese parliament member was killed in an Israeli attack

showing the ham 7701

Africa Horn At least 40 civilians killed in El Daein by Sudanese warplanes		Arabia Yemen says rockets hit Israeli military targets
Israel-Palestine-Jordan IDF says it shot down cruise missile %u2014 apparently fired by Houthis %u2014 over Red Sea		Israel-Palestine-Jordan IOF Bomb West Bank, Resulting in 6 Martyrs and Multiple Injuries
Syria-Lebanon-Iran Hezbollah's Mohammad Raad: The Father Who Joined Ranks of Martyrs' Families		Israel-Palestine-Jordan Israel has arrested the director of Shifa hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, and have taken him to an interrogation

Pregnant woman given heavy sentence for DUI crash that killed 3 after she boasted about driving recklessly

Link

Home Front: Politix

Ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden Smears Patriotic American Christians: ‘No Different' from Hamas Terrorists

2023-11-24

[Breitbart] Former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden, who has fashioned a post-government career attacking and censoring conservatives, is spending his Thanksgiving week smearing patriotic American Christians who own firearms, claiming they are "no different" from Hamas terrorists.

On Wednesday, Michael Hayden responded to a post on X that juxtaposed two photos: one of a woman holding an American flag, Bible, and handgun; the other of Palestinian terrorist Reem Riyashi, who killed herself along with four Israelis in a 2004 suicide bombing that was claimed by Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

"No different at all," Hayden chimed in.

Courtesy of Glenter Gleremble1307:

Michael Hayden is the former director of the CIA and NSA. This is what he really thinks of regular patriotic Americans. pic.twitter.com/A98qsOxgyB
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 23, 2023

Link

Government Corruption

FEC complaint alleges coordinated disinformation campaign from Biden's 2020 run

2023-11-10

[FoxNews] An America First Legal complaint argues that 51 former intelligence officials strategically crafted to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story.

An alleged campaign finance violation could ensnare Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 51 former senior intelligence officials who asserted without evidence in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. 

America First Legal, a conservative organization run by former Donald Trump White House aide Stephen Miller, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in late October, alleging a "coordinated communication" and an unreported in-kind contribution to the Joe Biden presidential campaign and related entities, in violation of federal law.

"[The] evidence suggests that the respondents failed to disclose coordinated expenditures constituting in-kind donations with respect to the infamous ‘Letter of 51’ former intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story had ‘all the classic earmarks’ of Russian disinformation," says the 13-page AFL complaint, with 110 accompanying pages of evidence.  

The FEC complaint claims that the Biden for President campaign in 2020, the Biden Victory Fund, the Democratic National Committee, and the Biden Action Fund should have reported on coordinating efforts.

The "Letter of 51" was released on Oct. 19, 2020, weeks before the Nov. 8 presidential election between Biden and Trump. 

The Obama administration officials who signed included former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Former George W. Bush DNI Michael Hayden, a vocal Trump critic, also signed.

The complaint notes that Panetta and Clapper donated to the Biden Victory Fund and the Biden for President campaign in 2020. 

In March, former CIA Deputy and Acting Director Michael Morrell testified to the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committees that on Oct. 17, 2020, then-Biden campaign adviser Blinken contacted him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported by the New York Post. 

The complaint cited an April statement from the House Judiciary Committee that summarized the Morrell testimony. 

"Morell testified that his communication with Blinken was one of a few communications he had with the Biden campaign, explaining that he also received a call from Steve Ricchetti, Chairman of the Biden campaign, following the October 22 debate to thank him for writing the statement," the House Judiciary Committee press release from April said. "Morell also explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement. Morell further explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-[former] Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election."

The letter from intelligence officials provided cover and credibility for social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to restrict the access and distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story, first broken by the New York Post. Eventually, both the New York Times and Washington Post verified the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop. Also, during the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden, Biden referred to the laptop story as Russian disinformation.

"There are reasons to believe that the public statement by 51 former intelligence officials was a coordinated political operation to help elect Vice President Biden in the 2020 presidential election, as set forth below," the complaint to the FEC says. 

This fits a pattern of election meddling, said Reed D. Rubinstein, senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations for America First Legal. 

"In 2016, high-ranking federal intelligence officials interfered in a presidential election, lying about Russia collusion in a failed effort to elect Hilary Clinton," Rubinstein said in a statement. 

"In 2020, many of these same officials again interfered in a presidential election, lying about Hunter Biden," Rubenstein continued. "The Federal Election Commission’s charge includes election integrity — Americans have the right to know who is coordinating with federal candidates. But this right is only as effective as the agency that enforces it. The FEC must act here." 

Neither the Biden 2024 presidential campaign nor the Democratic National Committee responded to inquiries for this story. 

The State Department also did not respond to an inquiry about Blinken’s role from Fox News about the matter. 

The complaint alleges that the "51 former intelligence officials" statement was part of a carefully orchestrated effort to influence the 2020 election. AFL argued the Biden campaign, through key individuals, actively participated in drafting and disseminating the statement. The complaint argues that the 51 former intelligence officials' public statement was strategically crafted to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story, with the intent of aiding Joe Biden's campaign.

The complaint details communication between then-Biden campaign advisor Blinken and Morell regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story. For his part, Blinken has denied having a role. 

"There is reason to believe that the respondents failed to report the above contribution and to identify the individuals who made it," the complaint says. 

The complaint also alleges that the disinformation campaign should be considered a "coordinated communication" under FEC regulations, subject to reporting requirements.

The AFL complaint contends that the Biden campaign actively participated in drafting and disseminating the statement, utilizing the national security credentials of the former intelligence officials to downplay the Hunter Biden laptop revelations.

The complaint further references a survey that found almost four of five Americans who followed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal thought that honest news coverage would have changed the outcome of the election. The survey by Technometric Institute of Policy and Politics was released in August 2022. 

Link

Government Corruption

Senior Member of 51 'Intelligence Professionals' calls for removal of US Senator from 'human race'

2023-10-10

[Red State] Former CIA Director and retired Gen. Michael Hayden seemed to call for the death of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) Monday night.

Quoting a Twitter post that asked, "Should Tommy Tuberville be removed from his committee? Yes or No?" Hayden wrote, "How about the human race?"

Tuberville has been bullied by Senate Democrats and know-nothing pundits since last December over his opposition to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin's creation of an "abortion tourism benefit." As Streiff explained:

In July 2022, Lloyd Austin declared that the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs vs. Jackon Women's Health adversely impacted military readiness because if pregnant members of the Armed Forces couldn't kill their kids, they couldn't do their jobs. To do this, Austin created a program that allowed military women seeking abortion to be reimbursed for travel expenses and take up to 21 days off — that is not charged against their annual leave balance — for the purpose of having an abortion. On the other hand, if one of your parents dies and you wish to go to the funeral, you pay your own way and get charged for leave. This is a clear violation of federal laws that forbid using federal funds for abortion. In December 2022, Tuberville announced that he would place a "hold" on all senior military promotions.

All the hold does is prevent a few senior military officers from being confirmed in new positions by "unanimous consent." This means each nomination will get a cloture vote before proceeding to a floor vote.

Unlike many Republicans, Tuberville has remained steadfast in his opposition and continues to place holds on senior military promotions. Hayden's retired. What does he care? Or is Tuberville blocking nominees for whom Hayden greased the skids?

Link

Government Corruption

Ex-intel Official Doug Wise Admits 2020 Hunter Biden Story Is ‘Real’ After Calling It Russian Disinformation’

2023-01-18

[AAN] Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director and former senior CIA operations officer, was one of the over 50 different intelligence officials who claimed the content in the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election was part of a "Russian information operation." Wise and the over 50 different signatories claimed that the story initially published in 2020 by The New York Post "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

Wise would go on to have an interview with The Australian this week, where he told them:

"All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible," adding he had "no surprise" that The New York Posts story, as well as the emails, were largely genuine.

So he figured the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop was so important it had to be surrounded by a body of lies? A properly trained journalist would have followed that statement up by asking why. I wish I could cuss properly to express my feelings about the lot of them.

In 2020, multiple left-wing signatories were among those who signed the open letter claiming the 2020 Hunter Biden email story was Russian disinformation, including multiple guest speakers on MSNBC and CNN, such as John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Victor Davis Hanson: 'Civil War' Porn

2022-08-21

[ZERO] As President Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover

This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a "civil war."

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy "civil war" conjectures.

Recently "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned civil war.

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of "nuclear secrets." Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss death-penalty prompt, adding that it "sounds about right."

Link

Home Front: Politix

Ex-CIA chief rates today's Republicans as most 'dangerous' political force in history

2022-08-18

[Washington Examiner] Former CIA Director Michael Hayden endorsed the assessment that Republicans today are the most "dangerous" political force in history.

Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times, got the ball rolling Wednesday in a Twitter exchange that comes at a time when the Republican Party has largely rallied behind former President Donald Trump.

"I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close," Luce said.

Hayden quote tweeted the observation, writing, "I agree. And I was the CIA Director."

Hayden, a retired four-star Air Force general who served as director of the National Security Agency and later the CIA under former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, is also the founder of the Hayden Center at George Mason University. He endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 in an ad for a group then known as Republican Voters Against Trump.

Link

Home Front: Politix

Ex-CIA chief endorses executing leakers of nuclear secrets after Trump raid bombshell

2022-08-12

[Washington Examiner] Former CIA Director Michael Hayden responded approvingly to a tweet talking about executions for those who spill nuclear secrets after it was reported that FBI agents were searching for classified documents related to nuclear weapons during their raid of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Link

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