Octopus Overlords

Ralph-Wiggum wrote: Wed Oct 14, 2020 1:36 pm Her original tweet is terrible. She argues that she then tweeted various issues with the article pointing out how shitty it is, but how many people will see those tweets? If she is going to link the article (which she shouldn't, since it's shitty), she should at least mention it's general shitiness in the original tweet. When it comes to these sorts of things, Maggie Haberman is one of the worst.

Holman wrote:Sourced by Giuliani, Bannon, and Rupert Murdoch. Seems legit.

malchior wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:26 am What is a little interesting is the debunking was super quick -- aside from Haberman and Sherman -- most serious journalists and even FB and Twitter moved to contain as much damage as possible. That's a real improvement. That of course has lead evil fucks like Cruz and such to write letters to demand why the liberal media is hiding the truth.

Kraken wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2020 10:56 am It's pretty transparently fake, and unlikely to fool anyone outside of trump's base, who are easily fooled by definition.

The instructions were clear: Write an article calling out Sara Gideon, a Democrat running for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Maine, as a hypocrite.

Angela Underwood, a freelance reporter in upstate New York, took the $22 assignment over email. She contacted the spokesman for Senator Susan Collins, the Republican opponent, and wrote an article on his accusations that Ms. Gideon was two-faced for criticizing shadowy political groups and then accepting their help.

The short article was published on Maine Business Daily, a seemingly run-of-the-mill news website, under the headline “Sen. Collins camp says House Speaker Gideon’s actions are hypocritical.” It extensively quoted Ms. Collins’s spokesman but had no comment from Ms. Gideon’s campaign.

Then Ms. Underwood received another email: The “client” who had ordered up the article, her editor said, wanted it to add more detail.

The client, according to emails and the editing history reviewed by The New York Times, was a Republican operative.

Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

The sites appear as ordinary local-news outlets, with names like Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today. They employ simple layouts and articles about local politics, community happenings and sometimes national issues, much like any local newspaper.

But behind the scenes, many of the stories are directed by political groups and corporate P.R. firms to promote a Republican candidate or a company, or to smear their rivals.

Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

El Guapo wrote: Thu Oct 29, 2020 5:32 pm Greenwald's picked his villains, and builds all the rest of his analysis from there. Foremost among his villains is U.S. intelligence agencies. Which winds up giving him some sympathy for Trump, because the U.S. concept of intelligence has agencies have generally always been at odds with Trump.

But as the new members arrived on Capitol Hill, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, found himself defending a pair of newly elected members on his party’s far right: Ms. Greene, a QAnon follower, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who has made supportive comments about the viral conspiracy movement.

Mr. McCarthy claimed both had disavowed the group, which has been labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat, and urged reporters to “give them an opportunity” before seeking to characterize them. While Ms. Boebert has said she is not a follower of QAnon and Ms. Greene recently said she had chosen to follow “another path,” Ms. Greene has never denounced the group, whose convoluted theory claims falsely that a cabal of Satan-worshiping, pedophile Democrats is plotting against President Trump.

CNN wrote:YouTube on Tuesday barred One America News Network from posting new videos and livestreaming for one week, after the right-leaning media organization uploaded a fake cure for the coronavirus.

“After careful review, we removed a video from OANN and issued a strike on the channel for violating our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure,” a YouTube spokesperson told CNBC. “Additionally, due to repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy and other channel monetization policies, we’ve suspended the channel from the YouTube Partner Program and as a result, its monetization on YouTube.

"Test of Ethics Awaits Biden and His Team"

Smoove_B wrote: Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:24 pmReally NYT? IS this a preview of what we're going to see non-stop for the next four years?

malchior wrote: Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:45 pm

Smoove_B wrote: Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:24 pmReally NYT? IS this a preview of what we're going to see non-stop for the next four years?

Awful - ooh they worked for 'undisclosed clients'. Welcome to high end consulting. I've worked for several clients that I can't disclose. It doesn't mean I'm in their pocket - it mean they just won't let my firm trade on our relationship and we signed agreements to that effect. It is perfectly normal. In the end, I think this is the usual noise we'll see and I expect it'll eventually die out if this administration is run anything like the Obama administration in the regards to personnel.

Jaymann wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 11:40 am Not so great was when I saw her on tape recommending reducing Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Doubt seriously if Biden would entertain that notion.

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:53 pm

Jaymann wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 11:40 am Not so great was when I saw her on tape recommending reducing Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Doubt seriously if Biden would entertain that notion.

And the secondary complaint against her is that she somehow wouldn't be enough of a deficit hawk because the deficit is suddenly again our primary concern. The actual main complaint is she was mean to some GOP Senators on Twitter...really.

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:53 pm

Jaymann wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 11:40 am Not so great was when I saw her on tape recommending reducing Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Doubt seriously if Biden would entertain that notion.

And the secondary complaint against her is that she somehow wouldn't be enough of a deficit hawk because the deficit is suddenly again our primary concern. The actual main complaint is she was mean to some GOP Senators on Twitter...really.

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 2:11 pm

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:53 pm

Jaymann wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 11:40 am Not so great was when I saw her on tape recommending reducing Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Doubt seriously if Biden would entertain that notion.

And the secondary complaint against her is that she somehow wouldn't be enough of a deficit hawk because the deficit is suddenly again our primary concern. The actual main complaint is she was mean to some GOP Senators on Twitter...really.

Fair enough! I'm down with the idea. I'm still waiting to see if NBC figures out how disastrous Todd was this election. I've been purposefully avoiding tuning in or giving them any clicks and seeing if they adjust on their own because he was...negligent often and next to useless the rest of the time.

El Guapo wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 2:14 pm

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 2:11 pm

malchior wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:53 pm

Jaymann wrote: Tue Dec 01, 2020 11:40 am Not so great was when I saw her on tape recommending reducing Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. Doubt seriously if Biden would entertain that notion.

And the secondary complaint against her is that she somehow wouldn't be enough of a deficit hawk because the deficit is suddenly again our primary concern. The actual main complaint is she was mean to some GOP Senators on Twitter...really.

Fair enough! I'm down with the idea. I'm still waiting to see if NBC figures out how disastrous Todd was this election. I've been purposefully avoiding tuning in or giving them any clicks and seeing if they adjust on their own because he was...negligent often and next to useless the rest of the time.

I'm sure that Todd already has a full calendar for 2021 of Republicans coming on to talk about how Very Serious they are about the deficit, about the importance of having Senate-confirmed and not acting appointees, etc.

Increasingly detached from reality, President Donald Trump stood before a White House lectern and delivered a 46-minute diatribe against the election results that produced a win for Democrat Joe Biden, unspooling one misstatement after another to back his baseless claim that he really won.

Trump called his address, released Wednesday only on social media and delivered in front of no audience, perhaps “the most important speech” of his presidency. But it was largely a recycling of the same litany of misinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he has been making for the past month.