You’re struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant. The “let me help you” megathread:

 Imagine you’re a normal person. The year is 2016. Rightly or wrongly, you believe most of what you see in the media. 

You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You’re a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts authority. 

Imagine your shock then, when Brexit, which you were assured won’t happen because it’s a fringe movement led by racists for racists, happens. The polls, which widely predicted it wouldn’t happen were completely wrong. 

The experts and media pundits who told you it wouldn’t happen day after day are also wrong. “Oh well” you say, “these things happen”.

Imagine that soon after Donald Trump is running for President. You are told by your favourite media publications that he is going to lose. 

Some experts say his opponent has a 99% chance of winning.

Imagine waking up on the morning after the election to discover that pollsters, media experts and politicians you still trusted were wrong again. 

The man who predicted 49 out of 50 states in 2012 has said who will win on Tuesday

Here Are Two Theories About Hunter Biden's Allegedly Abandoned Laptop

 If you’ve been following the Case of Hunter Biden’s Allegedly Abandoned Laptop, you know that a lot of very powerful people wish you weren’t. Twitter and Facebook have tried to censor it. The New York Times has spilled a lot of ink trying to discredit the New York Post reporters who filed the original story, without even trying to verify the story itself. If the laptop is real and so is the evidence on it, that could be bad news for Joe Biden. So our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left won’t even admit the possibility that it’s real.

 Theory 1: Hunter Biden, a known drug abuser, was visiting his father in Wilmington, DE in April 2019 and abandoned one of his laptops at a nearby repair shop.

Evidence: [a whole bunch including a map of the Biden home and the repair shop within 5 miles of each other, a signed receipt and more]

Theory 2: Putin did it.

Evidence:

Um…

Can I get back to you on that one?

Over Half of the Federal Government’s Spending Data Is Wrong

They even lie about the numbers.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), released a report Tuesday finding nearly every agency is failing to accurately report its spending as required by federal law.

The subcommittee reviewed over two dozen inspector general reports and determined 55 percent of the spending data submitted to USAspending.gov was inaccurate. The errors accounted for $240 billion in spending during the second quarter of 2017, according to the report.

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, or DATA Act, required federal spending to be easily accessible to the public through a searchable website, which became USAspending.gov. The website was revamped earlier this year, but agencies are not meeting their requirements to submit accurate, consistent, and reliable data on its spending.

The agency in charge of USAspending.gov—the Treasury Department—is among the worst culprits, as 96 percent of its own data is inaccurate.

"The most troubling aspect of the Treasury Department's difficulties in submitting accurate data to USAspending.gov is that it is the very agency that created the DATA Act standards for [the] rest of the federal government," the report said.

One hundred percent of the Defense and Energy departments' spending was either incorrectly reported or not reported at all.

The Pentagon's inspector general warned, "Policymakers may not be able to rely on the DoD's financial and award data to make decisions and effectively plan for mission critical programs and operations."

530 Sure Looks Like Facebook’s Lead Attorney Colin Stretch Lied to Congress While Under Oath

Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch may have not been completely truthful while under oath when taking questions in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017.

Stretch was being grilled by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) about the extent of Facebook’s ability to profile users on the social media website. Stretch told Kennedy that Facebook had done away with the ability of employees to compile or access profiles on individual users. Here’s a transcript of their relevant remarks:

Sen. Kennedy: Do you have a profile on me?

Stretch: Senator, if you’re a Facebook user, we would permit you to be targeted with an advertisement based on your characteristics and your likes along with other people who share similar characteristics and your likes along with other people who share–

Sen. Kennedy: Well, let’s do another one. Let’s suppose your CEO came to you, or not you, somebody who could do it in your company, maybe you could, and said, “I want to know everything we can know about Senator Graham. I want to know the movies he likes. I want to know the bars he goes to. I want to know who his friends are. I want to know what schools he went to.” You could do that, couldn’t you?

Stretch: So, I want to be—it is a very good question—the answer is absolutely not. We have limitations in place on our ability to review the person’s—

Sen. Kennedy: I’m not asking about your rules. I’m saying, you have the ability to do that, don’t you?

Stretch: Again, Senator, the answer is no. We’re not able—

Sen. Kennedy: You can’t put a name to a face to a piece of data? You’re telling me that?

Stretch: So we have designed our systems to prevent exactly that, to protect the privacy of our users.

Sen. Kennedy: I understand, but you can get around that to find that identity, can’t you?

Stretch: No senator, I cannot.

Sen. Kennedy: That’s your testimony under oath?

Stretch: Yes, it is.

Here's why his testimony is a lie (from the WSJ):

A small group of Facebook Inc. FB 1.49% employees have permission to access users’ profiles without the users finding out.

Yet any time a Facebook employee accesses a colleague’s personal profile, the colleague is notified through what is often referred to within the company as a Sauron alert—a reference to the all-seeing eye in the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, people familiar with the matter say.

Similar protections don’t exist for the two billion-plus Facebook users who don’t work for the company, the people said.

The dual standard for employees versus regular users is a window on Facebook’s struggle over how much to disclose to users about how their data is handled—an issue Facebook has recently tried to address with a raft of changes to the platform.

Kennedy specifically asked about the ablity to access user data, not the rules governing it.

BUSTED: Actual video of debate exposes ANOTHER Hillary lie

She invades his space, not the other way around.

At its core, the Washington Post op-ed by Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson is a facial lie.

There is no way of knowing with certainty whether Anderson is even aware of KC Johnson’s book, no less whether she read it, but as Anderson was a law prof before becoming Brooklyn College president, I’m going to make an inferential leap and suggest that she is fully aware of the fact that her op-ed is completely false, and that she is promoting lies to further her agenda.**

KC and Stuart offered to write a responding op-ed, but the Washington Post rejected their offer. The op-ed by Anderson sufficed to match their politics, and they were wholly disinterested in an op-ed that was objectively accurate and contrary to the lies they prefer.

There is a war going on to stop Betsy DeVos from rescinding Lhamon’s “guidance,” and that war is being fought by academics willing to sacrifice facts and scholarly credibility to intentionally lie to the public and convince them to fight any change to Lhamon’s radical and lawless shift of campus sexual adjudication. Repeat lies enough and people will believe. After all, who would assume a college president would outright lie?

Glenn Reynolds asks:

Why does Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson hate male students?

Trump and "lying."

David Horowitz

Consider also the most frequent lie about Trump – the claim that he himself is an extraordinary and inveterate liar, somehow even worse than his predecessor or his defeated electoral rival. But the “lies” Trump is accused of telling fall mainly into the category of opinions over which the left differs with him, or the exaggerations of a salesman who makes off-the-cuff claims without bothering to check the facts (not the same thing as a lie proper). The most memorable case of such overreach seems to be his claim that he lost the popular vote to Hillary because of voter fraud committed by illegal aliens. Since no one can seriously claim that voter fraud is non-existent, the “lie” consists in the number of fraudulent votes – three million or so – that Trump seems to have plucked out of the air. Obviously, Trump doesn’t know that there were three million fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election. But neither do his critics know there weren’t, since there has never been a national survey of voter fraud, while Democrats have done everything in their power to prevent a system of voter identification from being put in place. In other words, both sides are sustained by unsubstantiated claims, although it is Trump alone who has proposed to settle the argument through a new commission that will look into voter fraud across the fifty states.

Trump has never been accused of telling a lie with the life-altering consequences of Obama’s claim that “ISIS is on the run and al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat,” or that the Benghazi attack was over a video, or that you can keep your doctor if you like him. These led to electoral victories, complacency in the face of terrorist attacks and massive legislative programs. Nor has Trump lied to the FBI, the Congress and the American people about the existence of classified documents which he exposed to America’s enemies, as Clinton has.

The theme that "Trump lies" are all over the internet and the media, almost always without reference to specific lies.   Yes, Trump has been known to exaggerate, but as far as I know he has not told any specific lies.

More mainstream media mess-ups: The Muslim Olympian 'detained because of President Trump's travel ban' was detained under Obama

Who's the liar, the press or the Muslim?

Reporters have done it again.

The latest media misfire on the Trump administration involves Ibtihaj Muhammad, a New Jersey native who made headlines last year when she became the first female Muslim-American to win an Olympic medal for the United States.

Muhammad, a lifelong American citizen, claimed in an interview last week that she was detained "just a few weeks ago" by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. She said she was held for two hours without explanation.

Her remarks on Feb. 7 earned her an entire news cycle, as several journalists ran with reports suggesting, and alleging outright, that the American Olympian had been ensnared in the president's executive order temporarily barring immigration from seven Middle Eastern countries.

But Muhammad has since clarified crucial parts of her story, including the date on which she was detained. A Customs official with direct knowledge of the incident has also disputed much of how she characterized what happened.

"She comes and goes many times. She travels quite extensively. She has never been stopped before," the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Monday in an interview with the Washington Examiner, confirming that she was indeed detained. "She wasn't targeted. The checks are totally random; random checks that we all might be subject to."

...

Journalists reacted to the story on social media with the usual mixture of despair and outrage.

The problem with this particular news cycle is that Muhammad was detained in 2016, weeks before Trump had even been sworn in as America's 45th president.

To put it plainly, reports suggesting, and alleging, that the executive order had ensnared an American champion are totally false.

Before we go, a few points bear further discussion, and none of them reflect well on Muhammad or the press.

First, it's mind-boggling that no one in that room on Feb. 7 thought to ask her for the exact date on which she was detained. It's a basic duty of journalism to get the who, what, where, when, why and how to every story. That Muhammad's interviewers didn't think to pursue the "when" is astounding.

Secondly, Muhammad isn't blameless in all of this. A less-than-charitable person would suspect her of being intentionally vague and imprecise. She was asked a simple "yes or no" question about the president's immigration order. Instead of giving a simple answer, she provided an anecdote involving the very misleading use of "just a few weeks ago."

Her follow up remarks in that interview are also suggestive. Here's the next part of the transcript:

PS: That must have been a scary moment for you.

IM: It's really hard. My human response is to cry because I was so sad and upset and disheartened — and just disappointed. At the same time, I'm one of those people who feels like I have to be strong for those people who may not be able to find that strength.

I feel like I have to speak up for those people whose voices go unheard. It was a really hard two hours, but at the same time, I made it home. I try to remember to be positive and to try to leave all these situations, even if they may be very difficult, with love. I think that we will come out on top as women, as people of color, as Muslims, as transgender people, as people who are part of the disabled community — I think that we'll come out on top.

Muhammad, who did not respond to the Examiner's request for comment, did no one any favors with her language. Her remarks seemed to suggest her detainment had something to do with the president's executive order. Based on the press' coverage of her comments, many reporters clearly took that to be her meaning.

Lastly, the biggest problem with this particular news cycle is that so many reporters took Muhammad at her word. Few attempted to corroborate her story with Customs. That much is evident from the fact that several journalists thought the incident occurred post-Jan. 27.

In short, this entire news cycle is the result of reporters rushing to fill in the blanks in vague remarks made by a Muslim woman who, they thought, had been affected by the president's immigration executive order. They thought wrong.

Ann Coulter on "FAKE HATE"

Forget fake news; the real issue is fake "hate.”

Has there been one (1) documented hate crime committed by white people against any hue in the Rainbow Coalition since Nov. 8? That's out of the 9,456,723 hate crimes alleged by America's leading hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The SPLC is to "hate" what Rolling Stone is to rape. It is the biggest peddler of fantasies since Walt Disney.

I've read through dozens of SPLC "hate crimes" and they are all lies. The Muslim girls in particular seem to be very spirited liars.

Since the election, there have been vivid stories from across the nation of Trump supporters tearing off Muslim girls' hijabs -- at the University of Michigan (since retracted), Louisiana State University (also retracted), San Diego State University (that too was retracted), the New York City subway (again: retracted), and the University of New Mexico (no witnesses, won't reveal attacker's name or report the incident for investigation).

The main take-away from all these stories is: We sure have taken in a lot of Muslims! They seem to have trouble assimilating to American laws about not committing mass murder, but the good news is, when it comes to America's culture of victimhood, they assimilate like fish to water!

This isn't mass psychogenic illness, like when cheerleaders at the same high school all develop tics. It's not even the Salem witch trials. At least the Salem witch-hunters believed in witches. The Muslim hoaxers are lying, and they know they're lying.

...

The greatest fear of Muslims these days is that they won't be home when the "Today" show calls and will miss the opportunity to regale credulous hosts with stories about their victimization at the hands of white American men (whose great-grandparents are buried here).

The left has gone so insane that the SPLC, the main propagator of fake hate crimes, is the media's go-to expert on hate. SPLC spokesmen appear on TV and defame all the people they hate: whites, Christians, Trump supporters, cops, frat boys and so on.

The SPLC is like the cult awareness groups taken over by Scientologists. Terrified parents would call for help in rescuing their kids from Scientology and be told, No, Scientology is not a cult.

Read the whole thing.

David Brock Offers Money for New Dirt on Donald Trump

OTOH the Virginian Pilot is willing to lie about Trump for free.  Just doing  it's part to get "Crooked Hillary" elected.

Virginian Pilot Lies Again About Trump

In a front page story the Virginian Pilot lied about Trump and the birther controversy.  

You have to go to page 11 and to the 10th paragraph of the story accusing Trump of lying about the beginning of the birther story before you find that it started when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing for the Democrat Party's nomination for president.  

That's the point when supporters of Hillary began circulating rumors that Obama wasn't really an American.  It was also discovered that Obama's literary agents identified Obama's birthplace as Kenya, a detail that a supportive American press sends down the memory hole since it's inconvenient to the narrative they have created.

The April 3rd 2007 listing from Mr Obama's literary agents Acton & Dystel touts the then-Democratic junior senator from Illinois as 'born in Kenya'

The fable that Team Clinton had nothing to do with an attempt to make Obama an alien is laughable to any intelligent person, but the editors of the Virginian Pilot are not intelligent people.  They are partisans who are determined to drag Hillary across the finish line on election day, dead or alive.

Democrats dressed as reporters in the press try to brush away the fact that Hillary and her team used Obama's heritage against him by claiming that her fingerprints can't be found on it. But that's not how political smears get out. They are always disseminated by third parties who the candidate can disavow, but the damage is already done and some people will believe. Mission accomplished.

Much of the insinuation that Clinton had a hand in birtherism traces to the role of her then-senior strategist Mark Penn, who issued a memo in 2007 suggesting that Clinton emphasize Obama’s upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia and paint him as fundamentally un-American.

And then there's Hillary confidant Sidney Blumenthal who worked to spread the rumor that Obama was born in Kenya.

Journalist Says That Clinton Ally Blumenthal Once ‘Spread the Birther Rumor to Me’

"Crooked Hillary," as Trump truthfully labels her, is known for lying about her opponents, about her actions and about her health.  She lied about her e-mails.  she lied about selling her office to the highest bidder.  She lied about her health until an inconvenient video surfaced that showed her collapsing.  And the press, including the Virginian Pilot, in full cover-up mode, refers to the video of her passing out, going limp, and being loaded into her van like a side of beef as a "trip" or a "stumble."

That kind of shameless lying by the Virginian Pilot - and the other members of Hillary's partisans in the press - is what the voters of this country have to overcome as they decide who to vote for in November.  Thank goodness for the Internet where, among a cacophony of competing voices,  the truth can be found.

Hillary Clinton’s Nonexistent Diagnosis – No Such Condition As “Non Contagious Bacterial Pneumonia” in ICD-10…

There’s something very odd about the diagnosis that Dr. Lisa Bardack has presented for her patient Secretary Hillary Clinton, it doesn’t exist.

As you can see from the two-page letter presented today by Hillary Clinton’s doctor, she has been diagnosed with “mild non-contagious bacterial pneumonia“. However, there’s a problem….

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD), an ObamaCare standard, is designed code all medical diagnostics. According to ICD-9 codes, and the more current ICD-10 coding, there’s no such diagnosis as “non contagious bacterial pneumonia“.

Dr. Bardack apparently made it up.

One more thing:

Did The Washington Post Lie About The Michelle Fields Incident?

Father Of Benghazi Victim Challenges Hillary To Lie Detector Test

State Department misled public on Clinton emails, investigation concludes

This is my shocked face.

Cleric Who Claimed He Barely Knew San Bernardino Terrorists Exchanged Dozens of Messages with Farook

The cleric acting as spokesman for the San Bernardino mosque where terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook worshipped claims he barely knew Farook and didn’t know his terrorist wife at all. But phone records and other evidence uncovered by federal investigators cast suspicion on his story.

The FBI has questioned the cleric, Roshan Zamir Abbassi, about his phone communications with Farook — including a flurry of at least 38 messages over a two-week span in June, coinciding with the deadly Muslim terrorist attack on two military sites in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Abbassi, a Pakistani, insists he had nothing to do with the shooting at a San Bernardino County government building five miles from the mosque. While he confirms the text messages with Farook, he claims they were merely discussing food donations for his Dar-al-Uloom al-Islamiya of America mosque.

Abbassi maintained at a press conference that he didn’t know Farook any better than he knew the reporters in the room. But members of the mosque say Farook was a fixture there. He had been coming to pray and study at least three times a week for two years. In fact, he memorized the Koran at there, something you cannot do without learning Arabic, a subject Abbassi teaches.

Read the whole thing.

Why people hate the press, they lie. Exhibit #1 Rucker and Costa in the Washington Post.

The Washington Post's Phil Rucker and Bob Costa wrote an article Carson and Trump are dominating, but their chummy rapport turns cool attempting to show that there is growing friction between the Trump and Carson campaign.

I had no idea of it's a fact or just a piece of political agitprop until I came to this part:

In the media, Carson has come under fire for controversial comments, including his remarks that Muslims should not be allowed to serve as president, and that Adolf Hitler might have been stopped had the German public been armed.

That's just a lie. It's not just an oversimplification of something someone said, it's a flat out lie. Here is the Meet the Press transcript:

CHUCK TODD: Let me ask you the question this way: Should a President’s faith matter? Should your faith matter to voters?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it’s inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. But if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the constitution, no problem.

CHUCK TODD: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the constitution?

DR. BEN CARSON: No, I don’t, I do not. … I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

CHUCK TODD: And would you ever consider voting for a Muslim for Congress?

DR. BEN CARSON: Congress is a different story, but it depends on who that Muslim is and what their policies are, just as it depends on what anybody else says, you know. And, you know, if there’s somebody who’s of any faith, but they say things, and their life has been consistent with things that will elevate this nation and make it possible for everybody to succeed, and bring peace and harmony, then I’m with them.

"I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation" is not the same as saying that Muslims should not be allowed to serve as president.

With regard to armed Jews in Germany Carson wrote:

German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior … Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.

He said to Wold Blitzer of CNN:

"the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed."

The fact is that the Nazis disarmed the German people with special emphasis on Jews, making it a great deal easier - and safer for the Nazis who had to do the actual work - to round them up and send them to death camps. He didn't say that Hitler would have been stopped, not once, never.  But if you get your news from the Washington Post, you would beleive the lies. 

Benghazi panel says Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over all Libya emails, despite her claims

Well of course.

Hillary, the shameless shrew

I was going to compare Hillary to Donald Trump.  But that's unfair to The Donald.

Trump is someone who doesn't care; says what he thinks ... unfiltered.

Hillary is a shameless liar.

Hillary’s defining characteristic is shamelessness, her willingness to cross lines that liberals with more of a conscience won’t. [blaming the murders in Charleston on Republicans] So here she is using Trump’s remarks this week about Mexicans as a pretext to attack her old enemies in “talk radio” as well as the entire GOP field, of whom Trump is merely “emblematic” even though every Republican running this year supports granting illegal immigrants legal status if not citizenship. This is nothing more than her way of begging Latinos for their support knowing that Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio could complicate the Democratic stranglehold on that demographic. With Hillary, even accusing your opponents of being de facto accomplices to murder is something that can only be motivated by self-interest.

What Republicans should do is fasten on this statement and demand an apology.  Loudly.  They should see that she's using a metaphorical club, take it from her and beat her about the head and shoulder with it.  Repeatedly. It has to be made an issue time and time again because the media will try to form a phalanx to protect her.  Her statement is indefensible.  But if allowed to lay there, unchallenged, if forms a narrative designed to smear Republicans and their Conservative supporters.  This should be a teachable moment.  If Republicans let it go, they are giving her license to do it again, harder.  She has given them a weapon and they refuse to take it up at their peril. 

Hillary Clinton Crashes Airport Security Barrier; NY Times Silent.

Note Times Lies. I have said it in the past and it bears repeating that the main way the MSM lies is by refusing to report on "inconvenient facts."

Mocking the NY Times for all the attention they’ve given Marco Rubio’s driving record, Mark Steyn revealed something today from Hillary Clinton’s past that should put the NY Times to shame for focusing so much on Marco Rubio’s speeding tickets.

He explains how Clinton’s limo driver, back in 2001, in what he calls a ‘driving Miss Hillary’ situation, crashed through an airport security fence at 35mph with her in the back, injuring a police officer and only stopping because the police officer needed medical treatment.