Face masks, lockdowns, and curfews: useless!

 

This ironic report via Don Surber’s blog :

 The Associated Press reported, "The World Health Organization has recorded 65 cases of the corona virus among staff based at its headquarters, including five people who worked on the premises and were in contact with one another, an internal email obtained by The Associated Press shows.

"The U.N. health agency said it is investigating how and where the five people became infected — and that it has not determined whether transmission happened at its offices. WHO’s confirmation Monday of the figures in the email was the first time it has publicly provided such a count."

If masks, social distancing, and lockdowns don't work for WHO, just who do these things work for?

And Governor Mike DeWine’s announcement today of his arbitrary statewide 10pm curfew won’t do any good, either.  It will cause more damage, however, to the already crippled bar & restaurant industries.

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Fake News Propaganda – a Case Study

art credit: Henry Payne cartoon at Townhall 

Happy New Year! I’m starting off 2018 with a close-up look at how the media manufactures Fake News.

Frank Miele publishes news commentary in the Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper. On Dec. 30, he ran an editorial about an AP wire report, the misinformation it contained, and his subsequent efforts to wrench a correction out of the AP higher-ups (h/t Thomas Lifson). It is a bit of a read, but I am linking to it, because it provides a look inside a newsroom and how “Fake News” gets so widely disseminated. It is also a classic illustration of Trump Derangement Syndrome infecting the media pushing progressive propaganda. The Russian Collusion phony baloney is starting to collapse of its own weight, and Miele’s report is related to that, insofar as Andrew McCabe is one of the cast of characters at the FBI. Miele’s report starts off:

I took a rare shift as news editor last Saturday, which gave me an unexpected chance to put my finger in the dike holding back the flood of fake news caused by those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

As I was sifting through the Associated Press news report looking for wire stories worth putting into the Sunday paper, one story on the news digest caught my attention right away: “President Donald Trump reacts to reports about the retirement of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by retweeting falsehoods about McCabe’s wife.” 

“Oh no,” I thought. “What has Trump done now?” Because even though I am a Trump supporter, I’ve learned that Twitter can be a cause of trouble in the Trump administration as well as a frequent force for good.

But when I looked up the story, I discovered that my worries were unfounded. So, unfortunately, was the story.

When I read AP reporter Darlene Superville’s story, it was immediately obvious that she had either misunderstood Trump’s tweet or intentionally lied about it. She also plainly didn’t know the meaning of the verb “retweet,” since Trump had tweeted an original statement, not a quoted one.

Getting to the truth will take a bit of context, so here goes . . .

And he goes on from there in some detail. He eventually gets a correction from the AP, but here’s his conclusion, and one which I will put in my mental file for the next time I have a conversation with a liberal on media propaganda:

It was a small step, but an important one. Yes, I felt like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to stop the floodwaters, but it may be a hollow victory in the war on fake news. I have to wonder about all those hundreds of editors who put the same erroneous story in their newspapers or websites last weekend without question. Didn’t anyone other than me question the accuracy of the report? Besides, with the power of the Internet, the damage may be irreparable. I checked on Tuesday and found out that the fake version of the story was listed in a Google search 7,790 times whereas the corrected version only appeared on 5,710 websites.

Let the reader beware. 

You can read the rest here. It’s an uphill battle, so please pass it on!

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No repeal of Obamacare, again. Thanks GOP.

art credit: huffington post

The GOP members of Congress who put the repeal of Obamacare to a vote dozens of times during the previous administration [per Treehouse, the Senate considered only defunding Obamacare, not repealing], and the GOP candidates who pledged to repeal Obamacare in order to get elected, were all lying through their teeth. They never dreamed that Trump would be elected and that they’d be put on the spot to make good on their promises. And take a look at the two GOP Senators who just announced their intention to vote no! From the AP :

WASHINGTON (AP) — The latest GOP effort to repeal and replace "Obamacare" was fatally wounded in the Senate Monday night when two more Republican senators announced their opposition to legislation strongly backed by President Donald Trump.

The announcements from Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas left the Republican Party's long-promised efforts to get rid of President Barack Obama's health care legislation reeling. Next steps, if any, were not immediately clear.

Lee and Moran both said they could not support Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's legislation in its current form. They joined GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, both of whom announced their opposition right after McConnell released the bill last Thursday.

McConnell is now at least two votes short in the closely divided Senate and may have to go back to the drawing board or even begin to negotiate with Democrats, a prospect he's threatened but resisted so far.

Some of us had higher hopes for Mike Lee and even Rand Paul. Lesson learned: they are all politicians. And they lie.

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