What happened: The Associated Press issued new style recommendations that aim to promote diversity and inclusion by discouraging the use of "general and often dehumanizing 'the' labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated."
According to the AP, it all started with Trump making a big deal about Hillary's emails.
Hillary Clinton’s presidential dreams were undermined by her use of a private email server that included classified information.
You see, it was all about a server, not a word about destroying the evidence by wiping the server to Bleach Bit" 30,000 emails.
Donald Trump has risked criminal charges by refusing to return top-secret records to the government after leaving the White House.
Notice that "Trump's" a "criminal" and his records are "Top Secret"
And now misplaced files with classified markings has led to another investigation that’s causing a political and legal headache for President Joe Biden.
Now Biden just "misplaced" some "classified" files (how classified?), causing poor Joe a "headache."
But nothing to see here because this happens all the time. Mergerian trots out a Michael Hayden acolyte. The same Michael Hayden who thinks that Trump should be executed for his crimes. This Michael Hayden:
The retired Air Force four-star general wholeheartedly concurred Wednesday night with an Aug. 12 Twitter post by Financial Times associate editor Edward Luce that read: “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.”
But I digress.
Larry Pfeiffer, a former intelligence official, said the situation with Trump’s documents is far different than ones he encountered while working in government.
During the time that Pfeiffer was CIA chief of staff, classified files turned up in the wrong place in presidential libraries a handful of times, he said.
“It just happens,” said Pfeiffer, now director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “Mistakes get made, and stuff gets found.”
He said that seems more likely to be the case regarding the documents with classified markings that were found at an office used by Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement after his term as vice president ended.
Biden’s personal lawyers discovered the documents and contacted the White House counsel’s office, and the National Archives picked up the records the next day.
The situation appears like “an average, run-of-the-mill mistake” that’s “being handled in a by-the-book, textbook fashion,” Pfeiffer said.
"Mistakes get made and stuff gets found." What a change of tone when the top Democrat is found stuffing government secrets in his office closet and this garage.
We can only conclude that Biden's headache is all Trump's fault.
The AP hates the Supreme Court's defense of a Christian coach to pray in public. First proclaims it's no big deal.
Prayer decision not a game changer ...
Quotes the side that lost the case:
“I don’t think there has been a noticeable uptick in these sorts of situations,” said Chris Line, an attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates for the separation of church and state.
Calls praying in public "pushing religion."
there’s always going to be people like that who want to use their position to push religion on other people,”
Gives the megaphone to those who hate religion.
“The biggest mistake that happened out of the Kennedy decision was that the Supreme Court justices focused so much on the coach’s rights and they just completely disregarded the view of students,” said Line, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Since the ruling, Line’s group has gotten some prayer-related complaints, including one about a North Carolina coach holding a prayer service and a baptism on the field, and several about pre-game prayers over public address systems at high schools in Alabama. Line is convinced that more coaches cautious about team prayers will be emboldened to emulate Kennedy.
“That’s definitely going to happen. I just don’t know how widespread it will be,” Line said. “In the past, school districts, I think, felt a lot more comfortable to say, ‘Hey, knock it off.’ And now some school districts may misinterpret this and be afraid to protect their students.”
Rachel Laser is president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represented the Bremerton school board in the case. She lamented that the Supreme Court “adopted the deceitful narrative that Kennedy was praying quietly and to himself.” She also worried that it will encourage other coaches and teachers “who view public schools as a mission field.”
Laser said it’s too early to assess the ruling’s impact, and suggested some students may be fearful of speaking up.
Claims of violence are totally without evidence.
“We won’t get reports of every case like this because it takes a lot of courage even to file a report online, let alone to pursue it,” she said. “Our plaintiffs have had their windows shot through, their pets killed, received death threats and have been ostracized in their community — the full gamut of terrible things.”
Notice that those who are vindicated by the Supreme Court are afraid to go public.
Some public school coaches in Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee acknowledged feeling vindicated by the ruling and said they would continue to pray with students, but declined to be identified publicly because they didn’t want to draw attention to their teams.
“The Associated Press published a piece this week casting the confessional seal as sinister. That its reporters would even think to turn a prosaic defense of this venerable privilege into a scandal is a measure of our secularized times. Only until recently would anyone dare suggest that priests be coerced into revealing what they hear in confession. That cause over the years has been restricted to a handful of rabidly atheistic politicians. But now, apparently, the AP has joined it.”
The raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home by the FBI is reported by two news organizations. What I found fascinating is that the AP report is not nearly as informative as the Epoch Times report. I have published both articles [AP] and [Epoch Times]to allow you to compare.
The AP article by Eric Tucker implies without evidence that Trump secretly stole dozens of government secrets because empty covers were seized with nothing in them. According to the AP, there is no hint that the FBI took anything except government secrets that Trump had no right to have.
If you read the Epoch Times article by Zachary Stieber you will find that
FBI agents seized over 11,000 documents and photographs without classified markings from the home of former President Donald Trump, according to an inventory released on Sept. 2.
The Epoch Times presents a much more informative view of what the FBI actually hauled away from Trump's home, including items of clothing and gifts:
The more detailed receipt also shows that the government seized 1,673 magazines/newspapers/press articles and other printed media, some dating back to 2008; 48 empty folders with classified banners; 42 empty folders labeled “return to staff secretary/military aide”; 19 articles of clothing/gift items; and 33 books
It's just another example that the Virginian Pilot, which printed the AP article verbatim, misinforms its readers. It's also the reason that the readers that still get the Virginian Pilot and depend on it for their news are terribly misinformed; explaining why the letters section of this awful paper.
Inventory of Trump search released
FBI found dozens of empty folders marked classified
By Eric Tucker Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Along with highly classified government documents, the FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate found dozens of empty folders marked classified but with nothing inside and no explanation of what might have been there, according to a more detailed inventory of the seized material made public on Friday.
The agents also found more than 10,000 other government documents kept by Trump with no classification marked.
The inventory compiled by the Justice Department reveals in general terms the contents of 33 boxes and containers taken from Trump’s office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago during the Aug. 8 search. Though the inventory does not describe the content of the documents, it shows the extent to which classified information including material at the top-secret level was stashed in boxes at the home and mixed among newspapers, magazines, clothing and other personal items.
Reporter: “It’s an action that you say they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. [...] This is like - crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”
— The Hill (@thehill) February 3, 2022
Must-watch exchange between @APDiploWriter Matt Lee and @StateDeptSpox. pic.twitter.com/RPIPb2zwf5
This is a shocking war crime," said AP's foreign correspondent Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed Mohammed. "Israel is now blatantly attacking journalists. Behind me is the building that was our Gaza bureau of operations before the evil Jews demolished it. Death to Israel. Allahu Akbar."
..."Sorry folks, technical difficulties. As I was saying, Israel and its supporters in the United States have a lot to answer for in the deliberate targeting of the free press."
Similarly, those who followed a conservative media diet were much more likely to believe the false narrative that former Vice President Joe Biden called for a Ukrainian prosecutor’s removal to protect his son from being investigated.
The fired prosecutor at the center of the Ukraine controversy said during a private interview with President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani earlier this year that he was told to back off an investigation involving a natural gas firm that was linked to Joe Biden’s son, according to details of that interview that were handed over to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general Wednesday.
Fox News obtained a copy of Giuliani’s notes from his January 2019 interview with fired Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in which he claimed that his “investigations stopped out of fear of the United States.”
“Mr. Shokin attempted to continue the investigations but on or around June or July of 2015, the U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt told him that the investigation has to be handled with white gloves, which according to Mr. Shokin, that implied do nothing,” the notes from the interview stated. The notes also claimed Shokin was told Biden had held up U.S. aid to Ukraine over the investigation.
President Donald Trump urged the new leader of Ukraine this summer to investigate the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, a person familiar with the matter said Friday. Democrats condemned what they saw as a clear effort to damage a political rival, now at the heart of an explosive whistleblower complaint against Trump.
It was the latest revelation in an escalating controversy that has created a showdown between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration, which has refused to turn over the formal complaint by a national security official or even describe its contents.
Trump was asked Friday if he brought up Biden in the call with Zelenskiy, and he answered, “It doesn’t matter what I discussed.” But then he used the moment to urge the media “to look into” Biden’s background with Ukraine.
There has yet to be any evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or his son regarding Ukraine.
There’s no reason to beat around the bush here: what the FBI is claiming is mind-boggling when they claim the shooter had no target in mind. Consider the number of accidents of circumstance you would have to believe were going on here to not have the shooter doing what seems obvious from every piece of evidence we have: researching and planning for an attack on Republicans of some kind, particularly looking for an opportunity when security will be low and vulnerability will be high. This was an attack, not an “anger management” problem.Step back, though, and think on the institutional conclusions here. Considering how ludicrous the FBI’s conclusions are as it relates to an attack on the third ranking member of the House of Representatives, you might reconsider whether to trust the FBI’s conclusions in other areas, as well. And this is how our faith in institutions is degraded: steadily, gradually, with incident after incident where men in suits stand in front of microphones and make claims we know are not the whole truth.
On July 7, an Army veteran opened fire on law enforcement in Dallas, killing five and wounding seven other officers.
The shooter, who was black, said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.
…held an extraordinary four-hour meeting at the White House's executive offices with police officers, community activists and elected leaders.
He emerged from the session saying "we're not even close" to the point where minority communities could feel confident that police departments were serving them with respect and equality…
But imagine the outcry were he a Democrat. How many think pieces about violent imagery and responsible reporting would we see? How many more if he were a woman?
Keep this in mind for the 2016 campaign. This is the playing field.
What would happen to all these people insisting, “I’m all for freedom, but…”? What would happen to their sudden respect for religious sensitivities? How would they deal with it if the brutal murder of gay people we’re seeing in the Middle East was brought right to their doorstep? How would they reconcile the cognitive dissonance caused by two of their favorite groups of pet victims colliding in such an inconvenient fashion?
What would happen to their poor widdle heads?
My jaw dropped when I saw the tweet below, purportedly from the Associated Press. “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”Are we seriously supposed to mourn or even regret the death of two murderous jihadis who acted to stifle freedom of speech?What would the AP do if, as Rush Limbaugh suggested, jihadis start enforcing Islam’s severe prohibition against homosexuality by murdering gays who “provoke” them as the contest sponsored by Pamela Geller did?
White House officials–or those in the counsel’s office–could have successfully emailed Clinton’s private account while she was Secretary of State and just believed she had another government account. They may, as the Associated Press’s source noted, just not have been “aware that was her sole method of email and that she wasn’t keeping a record of her emails at the State Department.” But the outlet did not bother to inquire or let readers know if any officials actually did successfully email the then-Secretary of State on her private account.Apparently without having pressed the White House on its story, the Associated Press only noted that White House Press Secretary Josh earnest “acknowledged Wednesday that Clinton would have emailed officials on a non-governmenet account.”White House officials surely knew such an account existed after Gawker’s John Cook inquired about it two years ago. Cook revealed that in 2013, when working on a story about Sidney Blumenthal’s email hacks, he asked the White House whether Clinton’s personal email account, which screenshots that were provided to him revealed, was in compliance with federal laws.When covering scandals on the left, the mainstream press often omit important facts, do not ask pertinent questions that can poke holes in timelines and versions of events that are offered, and work as palace guards to discredit non-legacy outlets and reporters who try to unearth the truth. And nobody takes advantage of that more than Clinton.
In a piece titled “Charge of the Bile Brigade,” the National Journal’s Ron Fournier, a Platinum Media Cardholder who wields superior sanctimony like a superpower, indicted all “Americans” for “flit[ting] from one controversy to the next with little context or objectivity.”(Note: “Americans” is FournierSpeak for “Yahoos.”)Probably because social media can’t greenback and greenroom Ron Fournier to come on television and explain why everything that happens in America is really all about Ron Fournier’s feelings, Ron Fournier singled out social media by name as a big part of the Bile Brigade.(Note: “social media” is FournierSpeak for “The Little People.”)Into each story charged the Bile Brigade. Rumors, falsehoods, and rushed judgments poured into the public square, overwhelming discerning Americans who still desire solid reporting and thoughtful opinions. I am part of the problem: As a political columnist and Twitter unkie [sp], I’m not always sure whether I’m adding to or subtracting from the debate.Are vaccinations harmful? Can I get Ebola? Ask those questions on social media, and you’ll likely get mocked. …Many people, myself included, thought social media would help people overcome their inhibition and create a more vibrant public discussion. …Where does this leave us? First, we don’t trust the old media. Second, new media has made it easier for Americans to pull apart, and we’re no more likely to speak up. My hope is that as the new platforms evolve, the public will adapt and technology will be used as it has so many times in the past: To educate and unite the masses. This can’t happen fast enough. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do.If I’m reading this correctly, Fournier is okay with everyone having a voice … just as long as he approves of that voice.I must say, though, that Fournier’s desire “[t]o educate and unite the masses” puts a chill right down my freedom-is-messy loving spine.Will we be uniting the masses before or after morning calisthenics?
Wow, the Associated Press says its policy is to censor the Mohammed cartoons. MT @MiriamElder: http://t.co/x159wKhwaY pic.twitter.com/c4nMpUPwH4
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) January 7, 2015