In my day we got over disappointment with booze and cheap, meaningless sex with strangers.
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Fake News Open Thread
The epidemic continues:
On victory lap, few signs Trump focusing on unified nation
PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday was wrapping up his postelection victory tour, showing few signs of turning the page from his blustery campaign to focus on uniting a divided nation a month before his inauguration.
At each stop, the Republican has gloatingly recapped his Election Night triumph, reignited some old political feuds while starting some new ones, and done little to quiet the hate-filled chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump planned the tour’s finale at the same football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, that hosted the biggest rally of his campaign. Also Saturday, he announced the nomination of South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney to be his budget director, choosing a tea partyer and fiscal conservative with no experience assembling a government spending plan.
The raucous rallies, a hallmark of his campaign, are meant to salute supporters who lifted him to the presidency. But these appearances also have been his primary form of communication since the Nov. 8 election.
Trump has eschewed the traditional news conference held by a president-elect within days of winning. He’s done few interviews, announced his Cabinet picks via news release and continues to rely on Twitter to broadcast his thoughts and make public pronouncements.
And the media wonders why we don’t trust them.
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Media Doubles Down on Truthiness
When Colbert aired his skit on truthiness I laughed. Those were the bygone Bush43 days and it seemed, well, apt. Little did I know then that as years of Bush43 2.0, aka Obama, drew to a close, the media would become the very thing they mocked. But they have.
As we move towards eventually annotating the entire internet for truthiness, Washington Post reporter, Philip Bump, has created a Chrome Extension to fact check our President Elect’s notoriously dodgy tweets.
Behold, The WaPo’s new Truthiness Machine offers you a way to read Donald Trumps tweets just like they want you to:
It’s a Chrome extension, so Big Tech and Big Social is teaming up with Big Media to basically call the future POTUS liar right to his face. This is well past 1984 territory. This is a verbal fist fight with a man in a box. This is the most dangerous new platform design I’ve ever seen.
I mean, how the fuck do we even fight this? This takes any ability to have an exchange of ideas and persuade one another and makes it impossible. This is what the orthodox do to outsiders. I don’t know how to code or I’d built another extension attacking the WaPo and many other news outlets.
What’s the plan, man? How can we fight this bullshit?
Answers to these, and all your pressing question can be found in the comments of this open thread.
Faithless Elector is a Fucking Liar
Chris Suprun
The plot sickens:
No record of ‘faithless elector’ Chris Suprun as a 9/11 first responder
The Republican elector who has gotten national attention for refusing to vote for Donald Trump at the Electoral College on Dec. 19 was apparently not a first responder on September 11, 2001 as he has stated for years and has a questionable career history, according to an investigation by WFAA.
Chris Suprun, 42, portrays himself as a heroic firefighter who was among the first on the scene after the third plane flew into the Pentagon on 9/11.
In a heavily-publicized editorial this month for the New York Times, Suprun stated that as a member of the Electoral College he will not cast his ballot for Trump because the president-elect “shows daily he is not qualified for the office.”
Suprun, a Dallas resident for more than a decade, even used his résumé to establish credibility in the Times piece, writing in the second paragraph: “Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation.”
He has founded a nonprofit called Never Forget and state records show he is a licensed paramedic — but much of the rest of résumé, publicly available on LinkedIn, is questionable.
In addition, on at least two occasions over the last couple years at crowded Major League Baseball games, Suprun has been introduced as a 9/11 veteran before throwing out first pitches.
“He claimed to be a first responder with the Manassas Park [Virginia] Fire Department on September 11, 2001 and personally told us stories ‘I was fighting fire that day at the Pentagon.’ No, I was on a medic unit that day at the Pentagon and you make a phone call to Manassas Park and you find out that he wasn’t even employed there until October 2001,” said a first responder who knows Suprun and only agreed to speak about him if his identity was concealed.
The City of Manassas Park confirmed to WFAA that it hired Suprun on October 10, 2001, one month after the 9/11 attacks.
The fire chief there added that his department never even responded to the Pentagon or any of the 9/11 sites.
“It’s no different than stolen valor for the military; dressing up and saying ‘Hey, I earned a Purple Heart’ when you weren’t even in combat.’ There’s a big difference between shopping at Old Navy and being a Navy SEAL,” said the first responder who knows him.
But Suprun’s résumé raises even more questions.
It shows he was, at the time this story aired on WFAA, a paramedic with Air Methods air ambulance service. But Christina Brodsly, a spokeswoman for that company, said he is not an employee there.
Suprun also claims to currently be a paramedic with Freedom EMS in Dallas. But records from the Texas Department of State Health Services indicate there’s no such company. A firm with that name used to exist in Houston, but it went out of business in 2008, according to DSHS.
Turns out, federal court records show Suprun has spent the last five years in bankruptcy while his résumé says he was working. He even collected unemployment during part of it, court records show. Suprun was just released from bankruptcy supervision this month.
He never responded to multiple emails from WFAA and calls to his telephone go to a recording which says his voicemail is full.
Two public relations firms he has hired – Megaphone Strategies and Fenton Communications – responded to our requests for an interview saying: “Suprun’s schedule is jammed packed.”
This act of journalism was performed by a local news station in Dallas. (WFAA Channel 8) Don’t expect to see this story on CNN.
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Lame Duck Makes Lame Threat
With a little over a month left in his term, Obama is trying to sound like he has a pair:
Obama Vows Retaliation for Suspected Russian Hacking
President Barack Obama is promising that the U.S. will retaliate against Russia for its suspected meddling in America’s election process, an accusation the Kremlin has vehemently denied.
Amid calls on both sides of the political aisle on Capitol Hill for a full-bore congressional investigation, including assertions President Vladimir Putin was personally involved, Obama said in an interview that anytime a foreign government tries to interfere in U.S. elections, the nation must take action “and we will at a time and place of our own choosing.”
“Some of it may be explicit and publicized, some of it may not be,” he told NPR News Thursday. “But Mr. Putin is well aware of my feelings about this, because I spoke to him directly about it.”
White House officials said it was “fact” that Russian hacking helped Donald Trump’s campaign against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Administration officials on Thursday also assailed Trump himself, saying he must have known of Russia’s interference. Obama was to hold a news conference at the White House on Friday afternoon.
No proof was offered for any of the accusations, the latest to unsettle America’s uneasy transition from eight years under Obama to a new Republican administration led by Trump. The claims of Russian meddling in the election also have heightened already debilitating tensions between Washington and Moscow over Syria, Ukraine and a host of other disagreements.
Sarah Palin can hear Vlad laughing from her front porch.
But wait! There’s more!
Clinton says Putin grudge led Russia to hack Dem groups
Hillary Clinton said Thursday night that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged involvement in the hacking of Democratic organizations during the 2016 election stemmed from a longtime grudge Putin has held against her.
Meanwhile, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, issued a scathing rebuke of the FBI, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that “something is deeply broken” at the bureau.
[…]
According to sources who were present, she did not mention President-elect Donald Trump, but her comments reacting to news that the United States intelligence assessment of the 2016 hacking suggests Putin was involved was seen in the room as an implicit knock against the President-elect.
One of the sources said Clinton reacted to recent news by saying that she was proud as secretary of state to have defended democracy when confronted by the Russian president.
She also said Putin held a grudge against her stemming from Clinton’s comments about Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. Clinton issued a sharp critique of Russia’s parliamentary elections as secretary of state, suggesting that the elections were not free and fair. Putin then blamed Clinton for protests that broke out afterward.
Meanwhile:
Intelligence officials refuse to brief House panel on Russian hacking
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes on Wednesday blasted as “unacceptable” the refusal of the FBI, CIA and National Intelligence directors to brief his panel on the Russian cyber attacks that occurred during the presidential campaign.
Nunes had requested that National Intelligence Director James Clapper, with participation from FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan, brief committee members in a closed session on Thursday. That briefing has now been cancelled.
The California Republican, in a letter sent to Clapper on Monday, said he wanted clarification about why the CIA is now saying that Russian hacks of political campaign committees earlier this year appeared to be aimed at helping President-elect Donald Trump and hurting Democrat Hillary Clinton. Nunes pointed to testimony from Clapper in a public hearing in November that the Intelligence Community lacked the evidence to draw such a conclusion.
“It is unacceptable that the Intelligence Community directors would not fulfill the House Intelligence Committee’s request to be briefed tomorrow on the cyber-attacks that occurred during the presidential campaign,” Nunes said in a statement released Wednesday night. “The legislative branch is constitutionally vested with oversight responsibility of executive branch agencies, which are obligated to comply with our requests.”
If Obama has proof that the Russians hacked our election he should request a joint session of Congress and present the evidence to the American people. Put up or shut up. A Friday afternoon presser a week before Christmas won’t cut it.
Last but not least, here is some must-see television:
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BREAKING NEWS: Dylann Roof Found Guilty
Murderous Scumbag
This is good news:
Dylann Roof found guilty in Charleston church shooting
A South Carolina jury has found Dylann Roof, the self-avowed white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners in a Charleston church in June 2015, guilty of all 33 federal charges he faced, including hate crimes, murder, attempted murder and obstruction of religion.
Barring appeal, the conviction means that Roof, 22, could either spend the rest of his life in prison or be subject to the death penalty. Sentencing has been scheduled for January, and Roof has been cleared by judge Richard Gergel to represent himself in those proceedings. Experts have suggested this leaves Roof, a high school dropout with no legal training, much more likely to be sentenced to death.
The jury was composed of nine white Americans and three black Americans, who took less than three hours to come to a unanimous decision on the charges.
In addition to today’s federal convictions, Roof will also face a trial on state charges, currently scheduled for January. Roof could be sentenced to death in that trial too.
He deserves a slow, painful death. Maybe let some black inmates beat him to a pulp every day until his execution (which won’t be for years).
My objections to the death penalty have to do with wrongful convictions. I have no pity or sympathy for the guilty.
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Wednesday Overnight Open Threat, er, Thread, er Good Morning Thursday :)
I have another *fallback* event to attend on Inauguration NIGHT, signing up now, they have real food😉
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