Former Trump campaign official Paul Manafort has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for acting as an unregistered agent for Ukraine. But looking at the media coverage of the case one would never know that "taking down" Manafort was not all about Russia collusion. Reporting...or propaganda? Tune in to today's Liberty Report... read on...
The House of Representatives recently passed legislation that would expand the national background check system to require almost everyone selling firearms, including private collectors who supplement their incomes by selling firearms at gun shows, to perform background checks on the potential buyers. The bill has a section purporting to bar creation of a national firearms registry. read on...
On Monday, in an all-but-unreported news item, the Pentagon announced that it would be paying $946 million to Lockheed Martin toward the installation of a missile defense system that was purchased — not by the United States government — but by Saudi Arabia. In other words, the Pentagon is paying nearly $1 billion to subsidize a purchase made by a foreign power. read on...
Marco Rubio, the neocon senator from Florida, considers a suspicious power outage across Venezuela to be funny. He would no doubt feel different if his mother was on a ventilator in a Caracas hospital—then again.
Rubio’s little joke is comparable to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s national television chortle over the rape and murder of Gaddafi in Libya.
However, the top award for sociopathic viciousness remains on Madeleine Albright’s mantle of accomplishments. Albright was a protege of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski. She also went on national television and declared the engineered murder of half a million Iraqi children during the medieval siege of Iraq to be “worth it.” For her service to the Empire, she received the Senator H. John Heinz III Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award handed out annually by the Jefferson Awards Foundation. read on...
The View is an American morning talk show in which current events are discussed by a panel of women with radically diverse political beliefs ranging from Democratic Party neoconservatism all the way to Republican Party neoconservatism. Within this microscopic Overton window of public discourse, the subject of the House debate over a resolution to denounce Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of America’s involvement with the Israeli government came up at the beginning of the show today. read on...
Saying anything negative about Israel has long been the third rail of US politics and media. Israel is our nation’s most sacred cow. Any questioning of its behavior brings furious charges of anti-Semitism and professional oblivion.
I keep in my bookcase a cautionary book, "They Dared Speak Out" written by US senators and congressmen who all lost their positions after rebuking Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinians or daring to suggest that Israel had far too much influence in the US.
Journalists learn this first commandment very early. Criticize, or even question, Israel at your own peril. Until recently, we journalists were not even allowed to write there was an "Israel lobby." It was widely considered Washington’s most powerful lobby group but, until lately, mentioning its name was seriously verboten.
Now, young Democratic stars Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a feisty congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, have suddenly broken the taboo and said what dared not be said: there is too much rightwing Israeli influence and there must be justice for Palestine. read on...
Predictably during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, Republican chairman Marco Rubio condemned Venezuela's Maduro as a "clear danger" and a "threat to the national security of the US." To be expected the hearing was filled with plenty of threats and talk of flipping "military elites" and enforcing tougher sanctions. read on...
A surprise revelation from a staffer in House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) office has everyone talking about whether the NSA has really ended its metadata collection of our phone calls and texts, which was authorized by the 2015 USA FREEDOM Act. They say they no longer need the data collection allowed by the Act. Is it true...or have they developed something else? Tune in to the Liberty Report... read on...
Gone are the days when US consumers looked to the nightly news and print media as a trusted source of information, and especially if they hold conservative views, according to a new poll by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Things are going from bad to worse for the US legacy media as its trust credentials have reached an all-time new low, as if that were possible. It has even achieved a lower trust rating than lawyers and members of Congress.
The introduction to the CJR poll provided the following ominous opening: "For decades, we’ve known that Americans don’t trust the press. What we haven’t known is how people view the makings of journalism, from the use of fact checkers and anonymous sources to the question of whether money skews journalistic decision-making. This new national poll for CJR answers those questions, and points to how big the trust gap remains."
Indeed, the cynicism on the street should have every mainstream media purveyor in a state of absolute panic.
In one particular finding, it was revealed that many news consumers believe that reporters, seemingly in an effort to push forward with a political agenda, are too quick to run with a story before knowing all of the facts. This has never been more true before than in the Trump era where anything goes, so long as it trashes conservatives. read on...
When it was first revealed in November that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under secret charges by the Trump administration, I spent the next few days being told by Russiagaters that this was proof that I have been wrong about their demented cold war cult all along, because #MuellerTime is fast approaching. At long last, they vehemently assured me, Assange was going to prison for working with Russia to deprive Queen Hillary of her rightful throne.
None of those people have come back to apologize or admit that they were wrong when subsequent evidence disproved their claims. None of them ever do.
As it turns out, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a secret case investigating Assange for his 2010 role in the WikiLeaks publication of military war logs and diplomatic cables. Manning served seven years in prison for leaking those documents to the transparency advocacy outlet before her sentence was commuted by President Obama, meaning, obviously, that this sealed case has nothing to do with the 2016 leaks Russiagaters have been fiendishly obsessing over. Indeed, the Washington Post reported yesterday that “U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, say the case is based on [Assange’s] pre-2016 conduct, not the election hacks that drew the attention of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.” read on...
