Monday, October 19, 2020

Media: The Lies Never End

So many things aren't as they seem these days. All Things Media Big and Small just keep failing.


3 JESS 

 Take DEMOCRACY NOW! and Amy Goodman. Once upon a time, she blustered about going where the silences were and would have third party candidates on as guests. She'd even have them on after debates aired and let them answer the questions posed to the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. That was then.

This election cycle, they've completely ignored Howie. He has not been on once despite cinching the Green Party's nomination this summer. In fact, he didn't even get a headline mention when he won the nomination. By contrast, this time in 2016? From the moment Jill Stein won the Green Party's presidential nomination up until the election, she was a guest on 5 different programs. She was mentioned on many more including a segment where guest Chris Hedges explained why he was supporting Jill Stein.

For Howie Hawkins? It's been almost complete silence.

Almost complete?

September 15th, the Green Party was noted -- even if Howie himself remained verboten. Here's how Howie's run for president was discussed:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ari, can we switch to Wisconsin and the situation there with the court decision on the Green Party? Could you explain why it went down to the wire for even the court to consider this case, given that the election is only 50 days away?

ARI BERMAN: It went down to the wire in Wisconsin because the Green Party filed late to try to get on the ballot. So, there was a dispute, first, with the Wisconsin Elections Commission of whether they should be on the ballot. And then the question was: Should they delay sending hundreds of thousands of ballots to put the Green Party on the ballot?
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court basically said, “We’re not deciding this on the merits of whether they should be on the ballot. It’s just too late to add them to the ballot.” Tens of thousands of ballots have already gone out. Hundreds of thousands of more are going out this week. There’s been over a million absentee ballot requests in Wisconsin. And this week is the day that they start sending them out en masse.
So, I think this decision adding the Green Party to the ballot would have led to major voter confusion in Wisconsin, in that a lot of people who got a ballot would have had to then get another one. And there was a risk that they would be very confused, that some people might vote twice, or some people might not vote at all. So, irrespective of the merits of whether the Green Party should be on the ballot, I think election officials in Wisconsin are breathing a sigh a relief that they don’t have to print new ballots and they can send the ballots that have already been requested out on time.


Ari Berman. He's not with the Green Party. He's with the Democratic Party -- as anyone who read the dreck he wrote for years at THE NATION knows. (He's at MOTHER JONES now -- meaning no one reads him.) Is that what happened, what Ari says happened? Of course not. We've long noted his lies and he's not being honest yet again. WPR reported:  

Conservatives Justices Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley each wrote separate dissents, accusing the Wisconsin Elections Commission of violating the law when it denied Hawkins ballot access. The court's majority, they argued, had abdicated its responsibility.
"It is ultimate voter suppression when a candidate who presumptively belongs on the ballot is denied ballot access," wrote Ziegler. "Instead of acting swiftly, the court ducks behind its self-created 'it is too late' timeline to preclude a party from ballot access and to prevent voters from choosing the candidate they believe is best qualified."
[. . .]
"It's clear we got screwed," Hawkins said.
While the court's majority opinion was critical of the Hawkins campaign for not filing its lawsuit sooner, Hawkins said the campaign did what it could.
"We couldn't find a damn lawyer," Hawkins said. "You know, we went to the usual progressive lawyers and they wouldn't return our calls. So then we had to get on Google and find election lawyers."
Hawkins' campaign was eventually represented by the Milwaukee-based law firm von Briesen & Roper, a firm with Republican ties.
"They took the case," Hawkins said. "Where were the progressive lawyers to defend our right to be on the ballot?


There's a story there -- a story and then some. Ari can't tell it because he's not a journalist -- he's a partisan. Amy won't tell it because she's just a dirty whore who's bound and determined to grab as many dollars as she can. Amy knows the grants stop coming if you talk badly about the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. It's all about money -- whether she's grafting for grants or bilking PACIFICA out of millions for a show that they don't even know. Leslie Cagan was one hell of a crafty Communist when she sat on the board and got Amy that deal that never should have happened. But Leslie is elderly and lonely and Amy flirted with her and got her way.

No one wins with liars.


Take PEACOCK. Friends at NBC have begged us to say something nice about the service. Repeatedly, we've been frustrated by reality: The service sucks. We were urged to try it again so we did. And?

Failure. Epic failure. We were told that they had every episode of SATURDAY NIGHT is up on PEACOCK. They don't.

What to watch, what to watch? We decided a Ben Affleck episode. Ben's funny and a great host and we consider him a friend so it should be easy to say something nice about Ben. We watched the first show he hosted in the '00s and were ready to praise PEACOCK. However, sadly for PEACOCK, we enjoyed Ben too much. We decided to watch the first show he ever hosted, back in the 90s, when Gwyneth Paltrow participated in the opening monologue and Fiona Apple was the musical guest. And that's when the trouble began.

Fiona's a one-of-a-kind talent. We love her. So we noticed that there was no musical guest segments and that we only saw her when it was time for the goodnight tag at the end of the show. In addition, the Mango skit wasn't there at the beginning and, more to the point, another segment wasn't there at the end: Who Wants To Be Groped By A Thousandaire.

If you've never seen it, that's one of Ben's SNL sketches you have to see. He commits to it fully and he's hilarious. We would give him an Emmy for that skit alone.

But we have no praise for PEACOCK. Don't say you have every episode of SNL up for streaming when you don't even have complete episodes up. This is like the garbage that was WILL & GRACE on DVD years ago. Fans were all excited only to discover, after they purchased the DVD collection, that these weren't the episodes that NBC actually aired, these were edited episodes. So, no, this isn't what's promoted and it isn't what's needed.

If you don't have full episodes available, you don't have "all" episodes available.

It's a lie. And, again, no one wins with liars.

Lies are all around us.

We rolled our eyes at the attacks on THE NEW YORK POST and their report on Hunter Biden's computer, his e-mails, his photos. We rolled our eyes because of the lies.

That the story's false? No one knows that it's false.


But it was amazing how many liars ran with that. It was even more amazing when people -- dealing with the same basic data that we were -- lied repeatedly and said it was hacked.

Hacked? That was the excuse FACEBOOK and TWITTER gave for censoring the story.

They shouldn't have censored to begin with but what made our blood boil was the lie that it was hacked.

Where did the lie come from? The Joe Biden presidential campaign. We can't believe anyone took that garbage seriously. These e-mails were not hacked and they were the property of the owner who turned them over to the FBI and a copy to Rudy G. They were his property.

We're not inventing case law. We're breaking down reality for you. The press refused to do so and ran with Joe Biden's claim of "hacking."

Let's say you've got a lamp and some other furniture you don't like but you don't want to toss out, okay? You don't have room for it. What do you do? You rent storage. And you put your items there. They are your items. Up until you stop paying for the storage. After you miss your payment, the storage company can -- and usually does -- auction off the contents of your storage unit.

The story on the laptop is that someone (Hunter Biden?) brought it in to be repaired. They were contacted about it. They never picked it up. A computer repair shop isn't a storage facility. If you fail to pick up your item -- and item you haven't paid for -- it's now the property of the store.

These were not hacked e-mails. The laptop was the legal property of the repair store. The owner did what he wanted to do with it -- as was his legal right.

We were enraged and appalled as 'hacked' e-mails were promoted not only by Joe Biden's campaign but also by the media. If you don't know the law, get an expert.

'The owner is pro-Trump!!!!' Who the hell cares? His partisan leaning does not impact the law. It's his shop, equipment was left there for repair, it was repaired, it was not picked up and it was not paid for. At that point, he owns the laptop. As the owner, he can do whatever he wants to and, yes, the includes handing a copy over to Rudy G.

As FACEBOOK and TWITTER are rightly under fire, news outlets need to stop offering the 'hacked' excuse. These e-mails were made public by the rightful owner. This is basic case law and everyone knows it. What's the phrase? All together now: "Possession is nine-tenths of the law."