The rise of social media would seem an unmitigated boon for free speech, providing a platform to anyone with an internet connection. But recent news about Facebook illuminates pitfalls that belie that optimistic view.
“Some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s posts on Facebook have set off an intense debate inside the social media company over the past year,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Some employees argued that “certain posts about banning Muslims from entering the U.S. should be removed for violating the site’s rules on hate speech, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Earlier this morning we wrote about the obvious sampling bias in the latest ABC / Washington Post poll that showed a 12-point national advantage for Hillary. Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a9-point sampling bias toward registered democrats.
“METHODOLOGY – This ABC News poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Oct. 20-22, 2016, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 874 likely voters. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 36-27-31 percent, Democrats – Republicans – Independents.”
Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll.
Meanwhile, we also pointed out that with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily “rig” a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another. As a quick example, the ABC / WaPo poll found that Hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters. Therefore, even a small “oversample” of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points. Moreover, the pollsters don’t provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to “fact check” the bias…convenient.
Trump Up 2 Points Nationwide, While Clinton Campaigns As If The Race Is Already Won — IBD/TIPP Poll
JOHN MERLINE
With 16 days to go until November 8, Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 2 percentage points — 43% to 41% — in a four-way race, according to the latest IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll.
Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson saw his support held steady at 7%, while the Green Party’s Jill Stein dipped to 3%.
Unrounded, Trump leads 42.6% to 40.8% — a 1.8-point edge — with Johnson at 7.2% and Stein at 3.3%.
Trump also holds a nearly one-point lead in a two-way matchup — 43.2% to 42.3%.
James O’Keefe and Project Veritas are filing a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The decision comes amid increasing media coverage of the two videos released by O’Keefe, which expose apparently illicit actions by a group of political actors associated with the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the White House.
The establishment media was forced to cover O’Keefe’s videos after one subject, Robert Creamer, announced he would quit working for the DNC. This break came a day after the first video release prompted another subject, Scott Foval, to leave his job with another Democratic political group, Americans United for Change.
James O’Keefe told Breitbart News exclusively:
As the chairman of Project Veritas, our work is financially independent and beholden to nobody. Our work is funded by thousands of contributors, small, medium, and large. What I have learned about our media – and it’s frightening – is that almost everyone is compromised. Media companies are beholden to stockholders and I have sources that I am trying to get to go on the record to explain that these companies are afraid of reporting this story for fear of political retaliation. If the public knew the truth, I think it would change everything about American politics.
O’Keefe’s complaint states:
This criminal conspiracy involves the knowing and willful creation of coordinated expenditures from prohibited corporate sources. As is detailed numerous times in the Veritas transcript, attached as EXHIBIT A, the supposedly independent speech and actions of third-party groups were directed, controlled, or puppeteered by HFA or the DNC. Indeed, the record establishes not just simple violations of the FECA’s coordination provisions, but ongoing knowing and willful evasion of federal election law requirements through a complicated scheme. Because this conspiracy involves large numbers of employees, heightened travel, production, and distribution costs and because of the nationwide scale of the operation, upon information and belief, this triggers criminal penalties under 52 U.S.C. § 30109(d)(1)(A)(i).
By failing to abide by the law, these respondents misled the public about the true identity of speakers and funding sources for political protests and advocacy campaigns . This sort of evasion undermines the public’s trust in the electoral process and allows elite political operatives to operate above the law.
“Al Gore did not accept the results of the elections, and he said he would,”
by Jeff Dunetz | Oct 21, 2016 | Politics
As interest in contested elections have grown, based on the tenor of the 2016 presidential race, Fred has agreed to update the guest post below which speaks to some of the other of “rigged” presidential elections You will find that Donald Trump charges are not as unique as you may believe.
Guest post by Fred Lucas
Whatever you think of Donald Trump not promising to immediately accept the election result, don’t believe anyone who says challenging the result would be unprecedented. Donald Trump is not the first candidate to say a presidential election was “rigged.”
Media Pile-On Tries to Discredit, Unseat NJ Republican by Smearing Oath Keepers as The Democrats and their media amplifiers get their cover from a New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness “analysis,” claiming: The militia movement is decentralized, but it has two large followings—the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. Both have members who justify the use of violence to counter perceived threats or violations to the US Constitution.
Media Pile-On Tries to Discredit, Unseat NJ Republican by Smearing Oath Keepers as Terrorists
“The truth?” a political attack ad for Democrat New Jersey Congressional challenger and former Bill Clinton speechwriter Josh Gottheimer against incumbent Republican Scott Garrett asks. “Newspapers just caught Garrett at a fund-raiser with the leader of a home-grown terrorist militia group.”
A Clinton-backer promising truth should be all the red flags we need.
The “terrorist militia group”? That would be Oath Keepers, assuming you can believe those newspapers, which appear to be doing everything they can to sway the electorate into accepting a political narrative that folds under minimal scrutiny. Witness recent headlines:
“Republican Chairman of Wall Street Committee Held Fundraiser with Official from ‘Domestic Terrorist’ Group,” Joshua Green of Bloomberg Business Week “reports.” (Yes, that Bloomberg.)
“Garrett event promoter tied to extremists,” NorthJersey.com weighs in. “Forget Wall Street banksters. Scott Garrett has new friends, on a terror list,” NJ.com echoes and embellishes.
Sensing political opportunity and more headlines, Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg has called on Gov. Chris Christie to “denounce Garrett for his ties to the domestic terror organization” and on New Jersey’s attorney general to investigate if “Garrett violated New Jersey law, adding “In the wake of homegrown terror attacks – like the ones in Elizabeth, New York, and Seaside Park – the citizens of New Jersey deserve to know the full extent of Congressman Garrett’s connections to this terrorist organization.”
Yes, that’s Loretta Weinberg of “Confiscate, confiscate, confiscate” notoriety.
As an aside, it’s curious that Weinberg was referring to Islamist “domestic terror” acts with the principle suspect being one of those “refugees” Democrats are bound and determined to seed and embed throughout the Republic. Any connection to Oath Keepers was left (purposely) unstated, because there is none, and because the agenda here is to destroy them.
Which makes it fair to ask what the Democrat politicians and their “news media” publicists are talking about, and what else they’ve gotten wrong in their ceaseless, agenda-driven mission to conflate, smear, misinform and confuse. The answer is pretty much everything.
Note: This story has been updated with additional information
The following is a news media analysis and commentary
Regardless of who is your chosen – or least favorite – presidential candidate, independent minds should be concerned about the latest revelations in the news media’s unseemly relationships with government and political actors. While there are many responsible journalists working today, inside documents and leaks have exposed serious lapses constituting the most far-reaching scandal our industry has known. It’s our very own Newsgate.
Compromised reporting has always existed as a result of covert collaborations between reporters and political officials—Democrats and Republicans alike. For example, in my new book out next year, The Smear, I’ll report on instances of improper collusion that surfaced during the Bush administration. The most recent available evidence is heavy on Democrat-ties due to the nature of the available documents and leaks.
It can be argued that some individual accounts can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.
Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to act as a tool of any interest, publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’ve done just that.
Rigging the Election – Video I: Clinton Campaign and DNC Incite Violence at Trump Rallies
In this explosive new video from Project Veritas Action, a Democratic dirty tricks operative unwittingly provides a dark money trail to the DNC and Clinton campaign. The video documents violence at Trump rallies that is traced to the Clinton campaign and the DNC through a process called birddogging.
Rigging the Election – Video II: Mass Voter Fraud
In the second video of James O’Keefe’s new explosive series on the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, Democratic party operatives tell us how to successfully commit voter fraud on a massive scale. Scott Foval, who has since been fired, admits that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years.
James O’Keefe Demands The Corporate Media to Report Veritas
In this video, James O’Keefe explains how the corporate media, including Fox News, are allowing themselves to be intimidated by the Clintons and the DNC and are refusing to air the bombshell investigative video released by Project Veritas Action.
Ridgewood NJ, Josh Gottheimer is covering up allegations about a court case where he was charged with aggressively intimidating and assaulting a woman. His campaign spin machine is intentionally misleading the press using carefully parsed phrases to obscure the truth.
But the legal documents tell the truth: Gottheimer says the lawsuit was simply dismissed but he conveniently leaves out the fact that it was settled out of court and he refuses to say how much money the victim was paid and what else was offered to her in return for ending the lawsuit.
Josh’s campaign is calling his victim a liar by dismissing her experience as frivolous. How can Gottheimer call charges of assault and discrimination “frivolous”?
Josh can’t hide the truth forever, and we’ve got a few follow-up questions for Josh to answer. If there’s no real scandal, Josh shouldn’t have an issue providing the voters of the Fifth District with answers to the following questions:
Why won’t Josh produce the settlement documents to show what really happened? What is he hiding?
How much money was the plaintiff paid to drop the lawsuit?
What other non-monetary settlement was reached?
Was the plaintiff threatened or harassed to settle?
Was the plaintiff offered political favors to drop the lawsuit?
If nothing happened why didn’t Josh take case to court rather than pay the plaintiff off?
Josh Gottheimer claims to stand for women, but as is so often the case with Clinton cronies, it’s clear that his actions don’t match his words.
Far fewer making contributions to Donald Trump, analysis shows
New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, a newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner, spent the Republican National Convention pen-pricking presidential nominee Donald Trump as a misogynist shyster running an “ugly and xenophobic campaign.”
What Nussbaum didn’t disclose in her dispatches: she contributed $250 to Democrat Hillary Clinton in April.
On the nation’s left coast, Les Waldron, an Emmy Award-winning assignment editor at television station KFMB, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, swung right in July, shooting $28 to Trump.
And Carole Simpson, a former ABC “World News Tonight” anchor who in 1992 became the first African-American woman to moderate a presidential debate, is not moderate about her personal politics: the current Emerson College distinguished journalist-in-residence and regular TV news guest has givenClinton $2,800.
A few things you’re unlikely to read elsewhere: Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy – and Americans’ ability to choose their next leader – is being destroyed by a sequence of events way too well orchestrated to be coincidental.
[This election is scaring the hell out of people // Wikileaks shows Univision chairman influence over Clinton campaign // Women’s groups treat Bill Clinton and Donald Trump differently]
This is not about the billionaire’s qualifications or disqualifications to move into the Oval Office, his braggadocio, his awful manners, alleged sexual harassment, crass behavior, ostentatious wealth.
Americans have had unsavory political leaders before, most recently Hillary Clinton’s charming unfaithful hubby who, among other things, received oral sex from an intern in that same revered office. And then lied about it to authorities.
This is about Americans being politically manipulated quite cleverly, something people do not appreciate, if they’re allowed to be aware of it. Recent events could be a movie called “Wag the Dog – Again.”
In an interview with ‘This Week’ guest host Martha Raddatz, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich categorized Donald Trump’s ‘rigged election’ claims as a “coup d’etat” against fourteen million citizens who voted for Donald Trump in the Republican primary committed by “20 media executives.”
“This is about last Friday when the networks spent 23 minutes on the Trump tape,” he said. “And less than one minute — all three networks combined — less than one minute on the Hillary Clinton’s secret speeches that were being revealed on WikiLeaks.”
“I think it’s amazing that Trump is as close as he is right now, considering the one-sidedness of the news media barrage,” Gingrich said.
He also said: “I’m old enough to remember when Richard Nixon had the election stolen in 1960 and no serious historian doubts that Illinois and Texas were stolen. So to suggest that we have — that you don’t have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality.”
As chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti, the centerpiece of United States government efforts to jump-start the island nation’s economy after the 2010 earthquake.
Ms. Mills took the lead on smoothing the way for the company, Sae-A Trading, which secured millions of dollars in incentives to make its Haiti investment more attractive, despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. When she presided over the project’s unveiling in September 2010, she introduced Sae-A’s chairman, Woong-ki Kim, as the most important person at the ceremony, which included Mrs. Clinton and the Haitian prime minister.
Mr. Kim would later become important to Ms. Mills in a far more personal way — as a financial backer of a company she started after leaving the State Department in 2013. The company, BlackIvy Group, is pursuing infrastructure projects in Tanzania and Ghana, the only African nations in the “Partnership for Growth,” an Obama administration initiative that Mrs. Clinton helped initiate that promotes investment in developing countries.
After Juanita Broaddrick, who has long accused former president Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978, repeated those allegations in a January tweet, aides to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton quickly moved to gather information that could be used to undermine her account, hacked internal campaign emails released Saturday by the group WikiLeaks show.
There is no evidence that the campaign publicly responded to Broaddrick’s tweet. But the email exchange between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and David Kendall, a personal attorney for Bill and Hillary Clinton, offers unusual insight into how Clinton’s aides prepared to deal with one of the most sensitive topics it would face during the campaign.
“I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73….it never goes away,” Broaddrick had tweeted on Jan. 6, during the Democratic primary season.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman & CEO, Goldman Sachs (L) stands on stage with Hillary Clinton during the 2014 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York September 24, 2014.
by Tyler Durden
Oct 15, 2016 1:07 PM
As has been widely reported, in 2013 Hillary Clinton was paid $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs. One was delivered on June 4, 2013 at the 2013 IBD CEO Annual Conference at The Inn at Palmetto Bluff in South Carolina, a second one took place on October 24, 2013 at the Goldman Sachs Asset Management AIMS Alternative Investment Symposium, and the last one was delivered on October 29, 2013 at the Goldman Sachs builders and innovators summit.
The speech transcripts, in their entirety, were revealed for the first time in an email from Tony Carrk, research director at Hillary for America, in an email dated January 23, 2016, and disclosed to the public for the first time ever during today’s latest Wikileak of Podesta emails.
In the email Carrk says:
The 3 (I misspoke about 5 earlier) speeches to Goldman are attached with
some parts highlighted. Below are some of the more noteworthy quotes.
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