This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • Washington Post tries to smear McMasters; fails miserably

    Washington Post tries to smear McMasters; fails miserably

    The Media has tried to trash every one of the President’s appointees to his cabinet and generally they’ve only proved themselves petty and small. But never as petty and small as the Washington Post’s attempt at smearing General HR McMaster, the President’s choice for his National Security Advisor.

    President Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, was investigated by the Army and admonished two years ago for mishandling a case involving two junior officers accused of sexual assault, military documents show.

    McMaster violated Army regulations by permitting the two lieutenants to attend the service’s elite Ranger School even though they were under criminal investigation, according to a report by the Army inspector general.

    Sounds serious, doesn’t it? Well, even the Post admits that it’s not serious at all if readers bother to read past the headline and the initial paragraphs;

    The case against [the lieutenants] was dropped months later after the Army determined the alleged victim was not a credible witness.

    […]

    Under Army regulations, the officers could have been properly cleared to attend Ranger School if they or McMaster had obtained a special waiver from the Army’s deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon.

    McMaster told investigators that he was unaware of the waiver requirement. The inspector concluded that there was no evidence McMaster had “knowingly” violated that regulation.

    McMaster allowed the pair of rugby players attend Ranger School because he didn’t want to judge them before they were proven guilty and ultimately needlessly damage their careers and it turns out that he was probably correct in his thinking. At the end of the Washington Post piece, they fess up that the woman who charged the pair with sexual assault was a bit of a nut;

    As part of the rugby team investigation, the accuser had told Army investigators that she had also been raped by another West Point classmate, a member of the hockey team, while she was passed out in a hotel room.

    The hockey player acknowledged having sex with her after they had gone to a bar and said it was consensual, though he told investigators that it was “possible” she had not been conscious the entire time.

    The Army dropped charges against the hockey player after a preliminary hearing in which defense attorneys introduced evidence that the accuser had sent hundreds of text messages to the hockey player after they had sex, including two topless photos of herself. The evidence contradicted a sworn statement from the accuser that she had cut off all communications with the man.

    Confronted about the texts on the witness stand, she said she did not remember sending them. But her testimony led an investigating officer for the Army to conclude that her “credibility is null,” according to a memo of his findings in the rape investigation.

    The Post hints that McMaster was taking care of the lieutenants because of the “good old boy network” because McMaster had also been a member of the West Point rugby team. I guess they had to write something after they went to the trouble of getting a FOIA and all they had was this pathetic attempt at attacking a true American hero.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

  • NYT and Russian “election hacking”

    The New York Times reports this morning that the Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking;

    At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

    It also reflected the suspicion among many in the Obama White House that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia on election email hacks — a suspicion that American officials say has not been confirmed. Former senior Obama administration officials said that none of the efforts were directed by Mr. Obama.

    Sean Spicer, the Trump White House spokesman, said, “The only new piece of information that has come to light is that political appointees in the Obama administration have sought to create a false narrative to make an excuse for their own defeat in the election.” He added, “There continues to be no there, there.”

    I don’t understand – at the very worst, the Trump campaign is guilty of doing nothing while the Russians broadcast actual emails from the Clinton campaign. There was no hacking of the election, there was hacking of Democrat email servers. Votes weren’t hacked. The Russians have not been proven guilty of the hacking yet.

    What is disturbing is that the Democrats’ own behavior and their language is what defeated them at the ballot box, and apparently, the Obama Administration and the New York Times are angry that the voters discovered the truth about them. So, the real crime here is that voters were too well-informed.

  • Fake news in the New Year

    Folks are repeating the story that fake news on Facebook brought down the Clinton campaign, well, that and some kind of hack by the Russians. So it’s about time that the Washington Post combined those concepts and wrote their own fake news story about Russians hacking. This one claims that they hacked the power grid in Vermont.

    A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials.

    While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a security matter, the discovery underscores the vulnerabilities of the nation’s electrical grid. And it raises fears in the U.S. government that Russian government hackers are actively trying to penetrate the grid to carry out potential attacks.

    According to Burlington Electric Department clarifies that they found a stream of code that might be Russian, but it was in a laptop that wasn’t connected to the grid’s network;

    Burlington Electric Department

    From AOL News;

    Burlington Electric discovered that the laptop had been infected after the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report Thursday that included code believed to have been used by Russian hackers to penetrate the Democratic National Committee.

    The utility scanned its own systems for evidence it had been infected with malware and discovered a single laptop had been compromised — again, one that was not connected to the electrical grid.

    […]

    What’s crucial is that we don’t even know if the code was intended to disrupt the utility, or if hackers just wanted to test if they could penetrate the system. We also don’t know when the malware infected the laptop.

    I hear the Russians also hacked Mariah Carey’s New Years Eve performance. Maybe the Washington Post should check that out, too.

  • “Decorated marksman” in OKC

    “Decorated marksman” in OKC

    Decorated Marksman

    UpNorth sends us a link to a Military.com article about that shooter in Oklahoma City last week. In the headline and in the first paragraph, they call the shooter a “decorated marksman” because more than twenty years ago he once qualified as an “Expert” with his service weapon.

    Federal records show a man who police say shot and killed a former co-worker outside an Oklahoma City airport last week was a decorated marksman during a four-year career in the U.S. Army.

    Military records obtained by The Associated Press on Monday show 45-year-old Lloyd Dean Buie received an expert marksmanship badge during his stint as an infantryman from 1991 to 1995.

    The article, though, uses the term as if it’s an explanation for why he shot 52-year-old Michael Winchester. I qualified “expert” every six months, it’s not a big deal and I certainly wouldn’t say that I was a “decorated marksman” because of it. The shot in OKC was only at a distance of 50 meters, the shortest distance of all of the targets on the qualification range – even the worst shooters could have made that shot.

    Like UpNorth, I would expect that characterization from the Associated Press, but not Military.com. The Associated Press thinks that a NDSM, an Army Service Ribbon and a Good Conduct medal make you “highly decorated”, so….

  • How Macedonians won the election for Trump

    Eager to explain to themselves how, Donald Trump won the election the other night, New York Magazine breathlessly explains that Macedonian teenagers writing false stories on Facebook put him over the top. A Pew Research survey says that 44% of adult Americans get their news from Facebook, so they extrapolate that to a Trump win, since someone in Veles, Macedonia launched 140 fake news sites to publish on Facebook.

    All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook: The Pope endorses Trump. Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms. The Clintons bought a $200 million house in the Maldives. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook’s labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle.

    The LA Times wrings it’s hands over the fact that only 2 in 10 Americans get their news from the traditional media;

    The consequences of Facebook’s growing sway became clear during an election cycle that saw the rise of partisan news, conspiracies, fake articles and a winning candidate who fully embraced social media as a way to circumvent the media establishment and its proclivity for checking facts.

    Bloomberg is concerned because the media wasn’t able to spin news through their filters before it got to consumers;

    “This is a landmark,” [Ed Wasserman, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism] said. “Trump was able to get his message out in a way that was vastly influential without undergoing the usual kinds of quality checks that we associate with reaching mass public. You had a whole set of media having influence without really having authority. And the media that spoke with authority, the authority that comes after careful fact checking, didn’t really have the influence.”

    I guess we can’t trust that editorial filter in our heads.

  • The assassination attempt

    The Washington Post asks “Why isn’t the assassination attempt on Donald Trump bigger news?“, referring of course to the attempt in June by Michael Steven Sandford, a British citizen who had over-stayed his visa. He drove from California to Las Vegas just to assassinate Trump. His plan was to take a gun from a cop pulling security around the candidate. He even went to a range to practice shooting yesterday. So, the Washington Post wonders why it isn’t bigger news and they try to answer their question;

    From Trump’s perspective, Sandford doesn’t fit neatly into his campaign narrative. The billionaire has positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, so he certainly won’t use the failed assassination attempt to push for gun control. Sandford is an illegal immigrant — and Trump is all about deporting illegal aliens — but the candidate’s focus is on building a wall to keep out Mexicans and barring foreign Muslims from entering the United States. A Briton who overstayed his visa isn’t a very good poster boy for the cause.

    I don’t remember anything in the Second Amendment about the rights of assassins to take guns from police. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal already, so why doesn’t the Washington Post know that?

    There is an illegal immigrant problem along the Mexican border, if the Post hasn’t noticed. There is already a wall of water between England and the US, so a wall there wouldn’t have kept this particular illegal immigrant out. So, I don’t get their point on that either.

    They weren’t trying to make a point anyway, just feeding red meat to their readers.

  • CNN claims that it’s illegal for you to read Wikileaks documents without their filter

    I know that’s how they’d like to have it, but, no. Imagine the FBI scurrying all over the country trying to arrest people who read the Wikileaks documents, but ignoring the people who put the information in the hands of the leakers in the first place by ignoring the laws and their oaths.

    The only people who have a duty to obey privacy laws are government employees in their work environment. Yeah, we try to protect people’s privacy here by cutting out social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and phone numbers, but we have no duty to do so – we do it out of the kindness of our tiny black hearts.

    But, good luck with that, CNN. I’m sure the three viewers that you have left will believe you.

  • “Not the media” in “not a conspiracy”

    “Not the media” in “not a conspiracy”

    The Washington Post on Friday published this piece to tell it’s readers that there is “no media” conspiracy to control politics in this country. That it’s “lazy and unfair” of their consumers to claim such a thing.

    The media

    So what are the features on Memeorandum this morning?

    The media2

    CNN is busy providing smoke for the conspirators;

    Marty Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, said the timing of the stories was a coincidence.

    “We don’t coordinate coverage with anyone else,” Baron said.

    Not according to HotAir which noticed that the Clinton campaign website sent out it’s talking points on Trump on Friday, the day before “the media” filed it’s stories;

    The post, titled “Clinton Campaign: Trump Cannot Pass Debate Test If He Repeats These Debunked Lies,” goes on to document pages and pages of statements (19 pages in all) that have been deemed to be “lies” by biased outlets like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.

    It is clearly a road map for anyone looking to perpetuate the narrative that “Trump lies” and it’s a major issue that requires discussion and media attention right before Monday’s critical debate showdown.

    As if the message wasn’t clear enough in the post, the Clinton campaign was sure to hammer the story assignments home by conducting a special conference call on the topic for members of the media.

    […]

    Hillary posts pages of documented Trump lies” and holds a conference call with members of the media detailing the same theme and within 48 hours major publications print articles following along with Hillary’s prescribed narrative.

    The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Politico publishing the same story based on talking points from the Clinton campaign sure sounds like a conspiracy to me, media.