Biased Media

Trump’s “Lies” as Catalogued by the Washington Post | FLASHBACK

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have — over the years — collected responses in my Microsoft Word to a myriad of topics. The Washington Post’s article used often by Lefties and Democrats is an example of this: “In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims” (WaPo | The HILL)

I am about to offer my services in a discussion on the “inter webs” and I can see into the future [foreknowledge] this may be mentioned. Just guessing. If not, this is a good slight refreshing of a response written back in March of 2021. Keep in mind, this was a response to a person in debate a half decade ago:

Originally written 3-28-2021, with a slight update today (January 2026)

WAPO DATABASE

You are going off of WaPo’s numbers which other news orgs (CNN, ABC, etc.) use (actually one guy did most of the “fact chacking” –Glenn Kessler [DAILY CALLER]) — and the public assumes is proven by this widespread dissemination of WaPo’s database. Many “misleading claims” or what people mistaken for lies are just typical grandiose statements almost all politicians make:

★ TRUMP: Among the most repeated false claims that Trump spread was that he was responsible for the greatest economy in history. As the Post notes, former Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson and Clinton all were responsible for larger economic growth than Trump when using modern metrics.

★ BIDEN: “I said I was running to unite the country. And generically speaking, all of you said no, you can’t do that,” the president told the press. He still believes this, he added, but with caveats. “I’ve not been able to unite the Congress, but I’ve been united in the country, based on the polling data.”

BIAS CONFIRMED

But WaPo has already said – unlike it immediately did with Trump — The Post said it does “not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time” (NEWSBUSTERS | FOX) … This is bias by omission Ross. (FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE)

LOOKING INTO THE “LIES”

For instance, WaPo lists over 30,000 false, or misleading statements made by Trump in 4-years. You are basing your claims on the many media sources using this database by them. Here is one example from when that database reached the 5,000 mark:

  • The Post attributed nearly 140 of the 5,000 lies to Trump claiming the Russia investigation was made up or a hoax. It claims a report from the intelligence community had “’high confidence’ it was correct.” (AIM – now a disappeared article)

This is just one example that would kill 140 off the 5,000 list. (Now over 30,000: WASHINGTON POST | SEATTLE TIMES ) In a “lie” from the newer list of over 30,000 is this one:

  • “We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world…Powered by these policies, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

This was repeated 493 times. Oh no, say it isn’t so! *Gasp* — that is so unlike a politician. And, may I say, many of these are arguable. Another example looked at two statements made by Trump said to be lies but were in fact not. These would remove 63:

  • Together, these two statements would remove 63 from Trump’s total of lies, leaving him 62 short of the 5,000-mark. (AIM – now a disappeared article)

ADMINS: TRUMP vs. OBAMA

So, for instance, to COMPARE. Trump exaggerated the crowd size of his inauguration. Is this out the realm of a politician? Let alone a braggadocious one?

IRAN

…Ben Rhodes, the man who majored in creative writing and then ended up the Deputy National Security Adviser for President Obama, told The New York Times about the “echo chamber” he was able to create and feed:

  • In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. … They literally know nothing,” Rhodes bragged.

And the know-nothing millennials loved him for it. And, apparently, they still do….

(RPT)

That calculated political lie did more harm to the nation than any “lie” Trump told, like, crowd sizes.

OBAMACARE

Remember these?

  • “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Because nothing should get in the way of the relationship between a family and their doctor.”
  • His specific language varied on the stump, but Obama promised that his health care plan would reduce premiums “up to $2,500 a year per family” or “an average of $2,500 a year per family.” (and, Deductibles would go down)

OBAMA’S MOMO’S BATTLE w/INSURANCE

Here is another one you probably have not heard about:

… Barack Obama repeatedly said that his mother, Ann Dunham, fought with insurance carriers to pay her medical and hospital bills as she lay dying from cancer. Obama told this story repeatedly during the 2008 campaign, as well as after he became president, when making the case for Obamacare. After all, if the dastardly insurance companies battle a woman with a doctorate and her son with a law degree from Harvard, imagine what insurance carriers will do to you.

During the campaign, Obama said: “She was 52 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a pre-existing condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms.” He also said: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

But ex-New York Times reporter Janny Scott wrote a flattering book about Obama’s mom. Scott describes Obama’s mom’s “battle” with insurance carriers quite differently. Scott said Dunham had employer-provided health insurance that “covered most of the costs of her medical treatment. … The hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.” The only quarrel was over a disability policy Dunham had, but her pre-existing condition disqualified her. So much for the mean old insurance company, but Obama’s tale helped get Obamacare passed…

(LARRY ELDER: “If Trump Is ‘Liar-In-Chief,’ What of Obama’s Lies?”)

MORE

I think these lies did waay more harm to the country. Even the lies made before the FISA Court to jump start the Russian Hoax against Trump!

Also, here are some lies the “WaPo Database ‘reporter’” made himself:

  • NBC News Reporter Caught Lying about Michael Cohen Testimony on Trump and WikiLeaks (PJ-MEDIA)
  • Washington Post Caught Red Handed Peddling Anti-Trump Fake News (IBD, Archived)
  • Why the Washington Post Has No Credibility (TOWNAHALL)
  • Washington Post Caught Blatantly Lying To Their Readers Yet Again (Jimmy Dore Show, YouTube)

I also compiled a list — again, a long while back — responding to the “lies” thing again, with a slight update (a linked FEDERALIST article). BTW, I always truncate names as to not malign a person, but Miss Fiene was a salty-bitch if memory serves:

 I wish to note that the DOJ has agreed with me and not with you. What do I mean? Here is a Tweet and a pic of the official report:

  • they said he [Biden] was too old and decrepit [memory loss] in 2015 for a jury to think he could have knowingly and willingly done these actions. (pic included)

Are they dropping the same charges against Trump for the same reasons? No. You want to know why? Because he [Trump] has a good grasp on reality and a good memory. Trump doesn’t “Spins Yarns That Often Unravel” – as the New York Times says of Biden. Like,

  • Taught Classes At The University Of Pennsylvania;
  • Visited Ground Zero Day After 9/11;
  • Half his House ‘Almost Collapsed’ After a Fire;
  • House Burn Down with My Wife In It — She Got Out Safely;
  • Claims He Convinced Strom Thurmond To Support The Civil Rights Act;
  • He Began Career as Civil Rights Activist;
  • Saw Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse;
  • Ended Cancer;
  • Appointed To The [U.S. Naval] Academy In 1965;
  • Son Died in Iraq;
  • He Formed the Quad Alliance;
  • Born in the Same Hospital Where His Grandfather Died;
  • Was ‘Involved’ in Civil Rights Movement;
  • Went to a Black Church as a Teen;
  • Biden Says He Attended HBCU;
  • Biden Claims He Has Cancer (“That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up [with] have cancer”);
  • Wrote Law Review Articles About Right to Privacy (claimed he had written “a number of law review articles” about the right to privacy referenced in the now-overturned Roe v. Wade decision)
  • Was A ‘Full Professor’ At The University Of Pennsylvania;
  • Grandfather Died In The Hospital I Was Born In Six Days Before He Was Born;
  • Offered A Job by An Idaho Lumber Company;
  • Used To Drive An 18-Wheeler;
  • Visited Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue After The 2018 Massacre;
  • Chatted With an Amtrak Conductor in His Seventh Year As Vice President, When The Guy Retired 15 Years Before;
  • Detained By South African Authorities While Trying To Visit Nelson Mandela In Prison In The 1970s.

Etc., Etc., Etc. I left out the many political lies because all politicians try to spin the economy, inflation, debt, etc. I chose those because they are lies that show cognitive dissonance. Even after staff telling him to zip it this stuff never happened, he told some again months down the road. What THE FEDERALIST does is list Biden’s lies… but does not count multiples of the same ones like WaPo did: “Here’s The Authoritative List Of Lies Joe Biden Has Told As President: 439 And Counting”

FLASHBACK: Contessa Brewer’s Bias (Updated w/Jake Tapper)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Originally posted here November 2011) YouTube nixed this a long time ago from my Channel. So I grabbed it from a hard-drive and with new A.I. TECH, I made the audio waaay better.

(ABC 15 News Phoenix) On August 17, 2009 an unidentified black man carried an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle during an ObamaCare protest outside of the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona. At a safe distance, President Barack Obama was speaking to Veterans of Foreign Wars for a health care reform rally.

On August 18, 2009 on MSNBC Morning Meeting, Contessa Brewer portrayed the man, displayed above, as a gun carrying white man — near the President ( ‘a man of color.’)

Here’s what she brewed up:

  • “The reason we’re talking about this — a LOT of talk here, Dylan [Ratigan] — cause people feel like — ‘Yes, there are Second Amendment Rights’ for sure, but also there are questions about whether this has a racial overtones (sic) — I mean — here you have a man of color in the presidency and there’s white people showing up with guns strapped to their waist, or onto their legs.” ….

(Background via: Arlington Cardinal)

Usually I upload so there are no ads, but this way more people can see it:

Jake Tapper UPDATE

Jake Tapper Let It Slip On CNN. It Was The WORST Mistake He’s Made

Larry O’Connor rips apart Jake Tapper’s spin on the January 6th pipe bomb arrest, exposing how CNN, the FBI and Democrat media allies built a fake “white supremacist MAGA bomber” narrative while ignoring their own evidence. We walk through the clips, the race baiting, and the years of delay to ask the real question: was this incompetence, or weaponized lawfare? Plus, the show breaks down how this arrest undercuts the entire J6 storyline they’ve sold since 2021.

Charlie Kirk’s Death 100% MSM and Democrats Fault

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Any Rep. or Senator who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad. (THE LID, May 2025 | See also NYP, July 2024 | )
  • Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is under fire after widespread airing of four-year-old remarks in which he called former President Donald Trump’s voters a “horde of budding blood-and-soil fascists.” (Washington Examiner, June 2024)

Clay Travis has a blunt response to Barack Obama’s claim that he “doesn’t know” what motivated Charlie Kirk’s murder. In just two minutes, Travis summed up what every angry American is feeling right now.

“YOU CAUSED THIS!”

“You can’t call the president of the United States Adolf Hitler for 10 years… you cannot say that anyone who voted for Trump or advocated for him like you, me, Riley, and Charlie Kirk are Nazis, and then when someone tries to kill us, suddenly say, ‘We condemn this violence.’ You caused it!”

“Look at me right now! You caused this! When you tell people that someone is Hitler, you are telling crazy people: go kill them. And I’m sick of pretending that is anything other than what they are doing. … Charlie Kirk bore the brunt of that left-wing violence.”

Also see,

“How We Got Here“

And yes, Lefties [similar to Islamo-Fascists], Thinks Lawns Are Racist. Add to that Math. Even showing up to work on time is “systematic white supremacy.” When everything is racist there’s no room for reason. And this is what we are seeing, when horticulture is considered racist, you have a whole generation that is ill prepared for real life:

It is this generation of young adults, with safe rooms with videos of kittens when a disagreeing speaker comes to their campus… “what are these kids to do when something bad happens?”

Reason is gone, not offending someone is the new gospel: “…demanding the campus be made more of a “sanctuary” as they protested classism, sexism, discrimination and ethnic intimidation.” (Detroit News) | Milk and cookies, crayons and coloring books, therapy dogs and ducks (Campus Reform). When the real world and these people collide, escape goats are the outcome:

  • So, in the West as these “well-meaning” ideals works themselves out, expect more legal, cultural, and violent expression against those who hold to a historical, conserving theology and expressing this in public life. (ME/RPT in 2015)

Need more examples to support the Left’s [read here Democrats and the MSMS] push to label Republicans such horrible things that people want to kill us?

Which brings me to Nick Freitas’ response to the Left…

There is a civil war that Prager said was not bloody, that became bloody with the attempted assassinations of Trump, and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk.

America’s Second Civil War

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America’s Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech “hate speech.” To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot.

There will be unity only when the left vanquishes the right or the right vanquishes the left. Using the First Civil War analogy, American unity was achieved only after the South was vanquished and slavery was abolished.

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism — there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt — supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

The third significant difference between the First and Second Civil Wars is that in the Second Civil war, one side has been doing nearly all the fighting. That is how it has been able to take over schools — from elementary schools, to high schools, to universities — and indoctrinate America’s young people; how it has taken over nearly all the news media; and how it has taken over entertainment media.

The conservative side has lost on every one of these fronts because it has rarely fought back with anything near the ferocity with which the left fights. Name a Republican politician who has run against the left as opposed to running solely against his or her Democratic opponent. And nearly all American conservatives, people who are proud of America and affirm its basic tenets, readily send their children to schools that indoctrinate their children against everything the parents hold precious. A mere handful protest when their child’s teacher ceases calling their son a boy or their daughter a girl, or makes “slave owner” the defining characteristic of the Founding Fathers.

With the defeat of the left in the last presidential election, the defeat of the left in two-thirds of the gubernatorial elections and the defeat of the left in a majority of House and Senate elections, this is likely the last chance liberals, conservatives and the right have to defeat the American left. But it will not happen until these groups understand that we are fighting for the survival of America no less than the Union troops were in the First Civil War.

FLASHBACK!

JOE ROGAN learns live:

TMZ Caught Celebrating Charlie’s Death

Trump/Epstein: MSM vs. RigoStaRR

Published by Papa Giorgio

I love this guy: Twi-X | Facebook. Hands down — great work on the simplifying of tough “media narratives” exploded with truth. Here’s a couple of his videos:

ONE


TWO

4th of July ~ History 101

Published by Papa Giorgio

What Follows

  • Videos Of People Who Do Not Know History…
  • Followed By Some History,
  • Patriotism, Remembreance

Just a quick word regarding Mark Dice — who is the guy in the first video (and 3rd n 4th):

While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

Media analyst Mark Dice asks beachgoers in San Diego, California some basic questions about America’s 4th of July Independence Day celebration and their answers are quite disturbing.

MORE SADNESS:

FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD:

The signers of the Declaration of Independence (ALL BIOS HERE)

Delaware

George Read | Caesar Rodney | Thomas McKean

Pennsylvania

George Clymer | Benjamin Franklin | Robert Morris | John Morton | Benjamin Rush | George Ross | James Smith | James Wilson | George Taylor

Massachusetts

John Adams | Samuel Adams | John Hancock | Robert Treat Paine

New Hampshire

Josiah Bartlett | William Whipple | Matthew Thornton |

Rhode Island

Stephen Hopkins | William Ellery |

New York

Lewis Morris | Philip Livingston | Francis Lewis | William Floyd |

Georgia

Button Gwinnett | Lyman Hall | George Walton |

Virginia

Richard Henry Lee | Francis Lightfoot Lee | Carter Braxton | Benjamin Harrison | Thomas Jefferson | George Wythe | Thomas Nelson, Jr. |

North Carolina

William Hooper | John Penn |

South Carolina

Edward Rutledge | Arthur Middleton | Thomas Lynch, Jr. | Thomas Heyward, Jr. |

New Jersey

Abraham Clark | John Hart | Francis Hopkinson | Richard Stockton | John Witherspoon |

Connecticut

Samuel Huntington | Roger Sherman | William Williams | Oliver Wolcott |

Maryland

Charles Carroll | Samuel Chase | Thomas Stone | William Paca |

Reagan, Cash, and Harvey

Dennis Prager

Video Description:

Dennis Prager reads from the popular leftist website, VOX. From newspapers such as the N.Y. TIMES, the L.A. TIMES, and the N.Y. DAILY NEWS. These mainstream opinion pieces bemoan and degrade America to the point of hatred. Anti-Americanism is growing on the Left, and in taking these positions these people benighted themselves as our cultural commissars… dishing out their version of history to those unintelligent lap-dog readers they call customers.

Some More History

I want to thank Israel Matzav for the following, good stuff!

With thanks to the Heritage Foundation:

During the 1700s, Philadelphia was an unpleasant place in the summer. Malaria and yellow fever were rampant. There were no cures and no known ways to prevent infection. Most people of means tried to escape the city, if they could.

But in the scorching summer of 1776, scores of our country’s leading men remained behind closed doors in Philadelphia. They were kept there by their work. And what a monumental work it turned out to be.

The 56 leaders, representing all 13 British colonies, signed a declaration that would birth a great nation and illuminate the very future of humankind. It’s this Declaration of Independence that Americans celebrate each July 4.

The document’s first job was to officially announce to the world that all the colonies had decided to declare themselves free and independent states, absolved from any allegiance to Great Britain. That was momentous enough for the years ahead, since in order to make good on that declaration, the colonies would have to defeat the British in a war that stretched until 1783.

But the greater meaning of the Declaration — then as well as now — is as a statement of the conditions that underlie legitimate political authority and as an explanation of the proper ends of government.

The signers proclaimed that political power would spring from the sovereignty of the people, not a crowned hereditary monarch. This idea shook Europe to its very core.

The Declaration appealed not to any conventional law or political contract but to the equal rights possessed by all men and “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and nature’s God” entitled them.

What is revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence is not that a particular group of Americans declared their independence under particular circumstances. It’s that they did so by appealing to –and promising to base their particular government on — a universal standard of justice.

It is in this sense that Abraham Lincoln praised “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

Of course, it required another war to extend those rights to all Americans, but the fact that they were written down in the Declaration was crucial in 1865, in 1965 and remains so today as well.

“If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence,” wrote noted historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, “it would have been worthwhile.”

As Thomas Jefferson, lead author of the Declaration, put it in 1821, “The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”

Those flames, the flames of freedom and opportunity, continue to spread. That’s a truth worth celebrating on the Fourth — and all year ’round.

From, The Spirit of the American Revolution:

Even the Minutemen reflected strong religious involvement. While they are generally recognized for their exploits as a group, few today know many specifics about them. For example, these men who stood to fight for their liberties and defend their town were often groups of laymen from local congregations led either by their pastor or a deacon!  Records even indicate that it was not unusual that following their militia drills they would go to church “where they listened to exhortation and prayer.”

The spiritual emphasis manifested so often by the Americans during the Revolution caused one Crown-appointed British governor to write to Great Britain complaining that:

If you ask an American who is his master, he’ll tell you he has none. And he has no governor but Jesus Christ.

Letters like this, coupled with statements like that delivered by Ethan Allen, and sermons like those preached by the Reverend Peter Powers (“Jesus Christ the King”), gave rise to a motto of the American Revolution. Most of us are unaware that the American Revolution even had a motto, but most wars do (e.g., World War II—”Remember Pearl Harbor”; the Texas’ war for independence—”Remember the Alamo”; etc.). The motto of the American Revolution was directed against King George III—considered the primary source of the conflict; for it was he who was arbitrarily, capriciously, and regularly violated “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The motto was very simple and very direct:

No King but King Jesus!

The Fall of Minneapolis | 5-Year Anniversary

Published by Papa Giorgio

HOT AIR has a 5-year anniversary marker of the FALL OF MINNEAPOLIS. The entire post should be read and watched… but here is the documentary that busts holes in the narrative. It is long, but so is the depravity of the Democrat Party:

We have reached the 5-year anniversary of the George Floyd riots, which began here in my hometown of Minneapolis and spread throughout the country.

2020 was the year of unrelenting propaganda. By May 2020, you could just assume that anything you were told by the “experts” was a steaming pile of bovine excrement.

The whole point was to create hysteria, because hysteria makes people look to authorities for help. Fear about COVID was ramped up to such a level that only a few people had a decent grasp on reality.

When George Floyd, who died from a drug overdose and not asphyxiation, as we were constantly told, was videoed resisting arrest and dying while being restrained by a white police officer, it became a national obsession, and the world became even more insane. 

Liz Collins’ The Fall of Minneapolis carefully takes you through the facts of that and the subsequent days–something the news media never did–and conclusively demonstrates that Floyd was not “murdered,” that officials committed perjury to cover that fact up, and that Governor Tim Walz and other Minnesota officials allowed–you could even say encouraged–the destruction of the civil peace and of much of my city. 

 

Neil Young All Of a Sudden Believes In Free Speech?

Published by Papa Giorgio

A year ago Joe Rogan said this:

This is a partial excerpt of an excellent article by NEWSBUSTERS…

I will reproduce the WaPo article that is behind a paywall following the Newsbusters piece:

…. Young eventually returned his music to Spotify. Time has been kind to some of Rogan’s “problematic” pandemic views.

Meanwhile, Young said nothing about the media’s misinformation campaign tied to COVID-19. Remember how the jab would prevent the recipient from getting the virus and spreading it?

What about the six-foot rule? [article below – JUMP] St. Anthony Fauci? The serial attacks on the lab leak theory?

Young stayed mum through it all, even though he was outraged by Rogan’s so-called lies.

It gets worse.

In recent years, Young has said nothing publicly while Cancel Culture ravaged the arts. “Sensitivity readers” sliced and diced novels by Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. Comedians watched what they said for fear of career repercussions.

The Twitter Files scandal found a major tech platform silenced right-leaning Americans. Competing platforms booted a former President from their digital shelves.

The Biden administration, along with the disinformation czar dubbed “Scary Poppins,” vowed to censor more “misinformation” (like the Hunter Biden laptop story).

Where was Young during this crisis? Some free speech hero.

Now, Young is warning us that President Donald Trump might prevent him from touring stateside due to his negative comments about the 47th president.

“If I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket…That is happening all the time now.”

His proof? He has nothing save innuendo from a UK punk outfit who lobbed similar complaints without backing them up with facts.

Suddenly, Young cares about free speech again. That’s all well and good, but his silence during the Cancel Culture years and eagerness to shut down Rogan tell a different story.

He’s a fraud, a partisan who only pipes up when it suits his self-interests or political ideology. ….

Until just a few days ago saying some of these things could get you BANNED from Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube for spreading “COVID misinformation”—and now the experts are finally admitting many of the claims they originally dismissed as “conspiracy theories” were true all along.

In March of 2021, Rachel Maddow aired a segment about the COVID vaccines that was chock full of misinformation and outright deceptions, as the MSNBC host alleged that vaccines prevented both infection and transmission — statements that did not reflect the science at the time nor have they been borne out by subsequent research. Yet the segment remains viewable on social media platforms and Maddow faces ZERO consequences for perpetuating these blatant lies.

Jimmy shares his disgust with Maddow’s duplicity.

See the NEW YORK POST’S: 10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked

WASHINGTON POST (via ARCHIVE) June 2024

In The Pandemic, We Were Told To Keep 6 Feet Apart. There’s No Science To Support That.

In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

The nation’s top mental health official had spent months asking for evidence behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines, warning that keeping Americans physically apart during the coronavirus pandemic would harm patients, businesses, and overall health and wellness.

Now, Elinore McCance-Katz, the Trump administration’s assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, was urging the CDC to justify its recommendation that Americans stay six feet apart to avoid contracting covid-19 — or get rid of it.

“I very much hope that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I have been able to find online,” McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo submitted to the CDC and other health agency leaders and obtained by The Washington Post. “If not, they should pull it back.”

The CDC would keep its six-foot social distance recommendation in place until August 2022, with some modifications as Americans got vaccinated against the virus and officials pushed to reopen schools. Now, congressional investigators are set Monday to press Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease doctor who served as a key coronavirus adviser during the Trump and Biden administrations, on why the CDC’s recommendation was allowed to shape so much of American life for so long, particularly given Fauci and other officials’ recent acknowledgments that there was little science behind the six-foot rule after all.

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation, according to a transcript released in May.

Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.

Experts agree that social distancing saved lives, particularly early in the pandemic when Americans had no protections against a novel virus sickening millions of people. One recent paper published by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, concludes that behavior changes to avoid developing covid-19, followed later by vaccinations, prevented about 800,000 deaths. But that achievement came at enormous cost, the authors added, with inflexible strategies that weren’t driven by evidence.

“We never did the study about what works,” said Andrew Atkeson, a UCLA economist and co-author of the paper, lamenting the lack of evidence around the six-foot rule. He warned that persistent frustrations over social distancing and other measures might lead Americans to ignore public health advice during the next crisis.

The U.S. distancing measure was particularly stringent, as other countries adopted shorter distances; the World Health Organization set a distance of one meter, or slightly more than three feet, which experts concluded was roughly as effective as the six-foot mark at deterring infections, and would have allowed schools to reopen more rapidly.

The six-foot rule was “probably the single most costly intervention the CDC recommended that was consistently applied throughout the pandemic,” Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote in his book about the pandemic, “Uncontrolled Spread.”

It’s still not clear who at the CDC settled on the six-foot distance; the agency has repeatedly declined to specify the authors of the guidance, which resembled its recommendations on how to avoid contracting the flu. A CDC spokesperson credited a team of experts, who drew from research such as a 1955 study on respiratory droplets. In his book, Gottlieb wrote that the Trump White House pushed back on the CDC’s initial recommendation of 10 feet of social distance, saying it would be too difficult to implement.

Perhaps the rule’s biggest impact was on children, despite ample evidence they were at relatively low risk of covid-related complications. Many schools were unable to accommodate six feet of space between students’ desks and forced to rely on virtual education for more than a year, said Joseph Allen, a Harvard University expert in environmental health, who called in 2020 for schools to adopt three feet of social distance.

“The six-foot rule was really an error that had been propagated for several decades, based on a misunderstanding of how particles traveled through indoor spaces,” Allen said, adding that health experts often wrongly focused on avoiding droplets from infected people rather than improving ventilation and filtration inside buildings.

Social distancing had champions before the pandemic. Bush administration officials, working on plans to fight bioterrorism, concluded that social distancing could save lives in a health crisis and renewed their calls as the coronavirus approached. The idea also took hold when public health experts initially believed that the coronavirus was often transmitted by droplets expelled by infected people, which could land several feet away; the CDC later acknowledged the virus was airborne and people could be exposed just by sharing the same air in a room, even if they were farther than six feet apart.

“There was no magic around six feet,” Robert R. Redfield, who served as CDC director during the Trump administration, told a congressional committee in March 2022. “It’s just historically that’s what was used for other respiratory pathogens. So that really became the first piece” of a strategy to protect Americans in the early days of the virus, he said.

It also became the standard that states and businesses adopted, with swift pressure on holdouts. Lawmakers and workers urged meat processing plants, delivery companies and other essential businesses to adopt the CDC’s social distancing recommendations as their employees continued reporting to work during the pandemic.

Some business leaders weren’t sure the measures made sense. Jeff Bezos, founder of online retail giant Amazon, petitioned the White House in March 2020 to consider revising the six-foot recommendation, said Adam Boehler, then a senior Trump administration official helping with the coronavirus response. At the time, Amazon was facing questions about a rising number of infections in its warehouses, and Democratic senators were urging the company to adopt social distancing.

“Bezos called me and asked, is there any real science behind this rule?” Boehler said, adding that Bezos pushed on whether Amazon could adopt an alternative distance if workers were masked, physically separated by dividers or other precautions were taken. “He said … it’s the backbone of trying to keep America running here, and when you separate somebody five feet versus six feet, it’s a big difference,” Boehler recalled. Bezos owns The Washington Post.

Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed that Bezos called Boehler and said the Amazon founder’s focus was the discrepancy between the U.S. recommendation and the WHO’s shorter distance. The company soon said it would follow the CDC’s six-foot social distancing guidelines in its warehouses and later developed technologies to try to enforce those guidelines. “We did it globally everywhere because it was the right thing to do,” Nantel said.

Boehler said he spoke with Redfield and Fauci about testing alternatives to the six-foot recommendation but that he was not aware of what happened to those tests or what they found. Fauci declined to comment. Redfield did not respond to requests for comment.

But challenging the six-foot recommendation, particularly in the pandemic’s early days, was seen as politically difficult. Rochelle Walensky, then chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital, argued in a July 2020 email that “if people are masked it is quite safe and much more practical to be at 3 feet” in many school settings.

Five months later, incoming president Joe Biden would tap Walensky as his CDC director. Walensky swiftly endorsed the six-foot distance before working to loosen it, announcing in March 2021 that elementary school students could sit three feet apart if they were masked. Walensky declined to comment.

The most persistent government critic of the social distancing guidelines may have been McCance-Katz, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Trump’s mental health chief had spent several years clashing with other Department of Health and Human Services officials on various matters and had few internal defenders by the time the pandemic arrived, hampering her message. But while her pleas failed to move the CDC, her warnings about the risks to mental health found an audience with Trump and his allies, who blamed federal bureaucrats for the six-foot rule and other measures.

“What is this nonsense that somehow it’s unsafe to return to school?” McCance-Katz said in September 2020 on an HHS podcast, lamenting the broader shutdown of American life. “I do think that Americans are smart people, and I think that they need to start asking questions about why is it this way.”

Jeff Bezos/WaPo Have Been Trumpified! | Larry O’Connor

Published by Papa Giorgio

On this full, LIVE episode of LARRY with Larry O’Connor, we discuss Jeff Bezos’ decision to COMPLETELY OVERHAUL the editorial direction of “The Washington Post,” liberal reporters and journalists RAGING over the decision, Jake Tapper’s new book that PROVES he’s a complete moron, Scott Jennings going ALL IN on CNN, and MUCH, much more!

Yes, The Central Park Five Are Guilty (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Posted/Updated in September 2019 ~ Re-Posted Today

This is an update to the post by way of a visual adaptation by the interviewer, Larry Elder. How anyone can even think these kids weren’t involved is beyond me. A great video update to the original post. (Video description to follow)

UPDATE

Larry takes a look at the accuracy of the Netflix mini-series When They See Us. The series was inspired by the 1989 Central Park jogger case where 28-year-old Trisha Meili was raped and assaulted, while other victims were attacked and robbed. Five black teens were indicted for attempted murder and other charges in the attack. They were found guilty, but the charges were later vacated. Claims of mistreatment and abuse by police were claimed by the defendants, popularizing the incident. Larry takes a look at the details and shares his interview with black detective Eric Reynolds, who was on the scene at the time, to see just who was to blame for what in this incident. See the interviews for yourself: https://centralpark5joggerattackers.com

Below are three separate shows, weeks apart, by LARRY ELDER. The first upload garnered a mass amount of thumbs down and negative comments. All by people who didn’t listen to it and are incurable victicrats. If you listen to these three uploads — below — and still believe the crap peddled over at NETFLIX… you may also be an incurable victicrat.

PART ONE

This is basically an excoriation of the idea that the “Central Park Five” are innocent. Psalm 97:10 says, “Let those who love the LORD hate evil.” I think of that when Trump mentions society “hating” these rapists (12:05 mark) Larry Elder plays how Van “commie” Jones and Chris Cuomo deal with one of the few Republicans left over at CNN (a MUST read article about CNN can be found at the WASHINGTON TIMES) who differed on the “Central Park Five.” Around the 6:00 mark Larry interviews (from last year) Ann Coulter, and then later (at the 14:41 mark) reads from a DAILY BEAST article, “The Myth of the Central Park Five”

Ann Coulter has a couple good articles on the topic:

The refusal to allow dissenting views is a BIG issue at CNN and MSNBC. In fact, Larry Elder says this episode where Lawrence O’Donnell refused to let John O’Neill of Swift Boat fame speak is what got him a job on MSNBC. NOT ONLY does the MSM censor conservative and Republicans, by doing so they perpetuate the innocence of thugs and killers. Thus, bringing a net evil to society in various ways (attacking truth, attacking innocent civilians, allowing criminal to be emboldened).

See also:

  • 7 Things You Need To Know About The Central Park Jogger Case (DAILY WIRE, August 2016)
  • Donald Trump Isn’t Alone in Believing “Central Park Five” Are Guilty (LAW and CRIME, October 2017, )
  • The “Central Park Five”: Still Guilty (FRONT-PAGE MAGAZINE, August 2014)

PART TWO

Larry Elder reads from various sources, one being the Wall Street Journal piece by Linda Fairstein entitled, “Netflix’s False Story of the Central Park Five: Ava DuVernay’s miniseries wrongly portrays them as totally innocent—and defames me in the process“. A previous upload can really be PART ONE to this audio: “Yes, The Central Park Five Are Guilty“. I highly suggest LEGAL INSURRECTION’S post on this topic as well.

Enjoy… I will share a thought from a comment from part one:

  • “The comments are filled with people who didn’t listen to the video and didn’t look at the evidence independently.”

I can only assume the same will happen here.

PART THREE

Larry Elder interviews Detective Eric Reynolds regarding his intimate knowledge of the Central Park Five.

This really is a death knell for the lies regarding this case. Detective Reynolds mentions a website where one can view all the confessions and read the judges ruling and the police report. The website is called: “THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE JOGGER ATTACKERS: Guilty – In Their Own Words”. This is great radio, enjoy, and I hope to get the detectives book at some point when (not if) he is published.

Detective Reynolds recently appeared on CNN to discuss the matter as well:

Dems/MSM Were Against Pre-Emptive Pardons Before They Were For Them

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” shares a DM clip of his talk with co-host Russell Brand about Joy Reid, Adam Schiff, and other mainstream media pundits having their previous comments on Pre-Emptive Pardons blow up in their faces now that Joe Biden has issued a flurry of pre-emptive pardons of his family members. Watch Dave Rubin’s FULL SHOW:

Schumer/Schiff Flashback!

The Real Lie of the Year | The “Shadow Presidency”

Published by Papa Giorgio

1st Posted 12-29-2024 ~ Updated Info:

President Joe Biden is not fully in charge of the country due to cognitive decline, and a “shadow presidency” is controlling him, a Democratic National Committee member has said.

Lindy Li, a member of the DNC‘s National Finance Committee, expressed her concerns about the mental acuity of the 82-year-old president in an interview on NewsNation on Sunday.

(NEWSWEEK)

REAL CLEAR POLITICS has the transcript of this video

Here is the WALL STREET JOURNAL article not behind a pay wall

PolitiFact said the “lie of the year” was Trump saying that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. (CAUTION – SEE: here, here, here, here.) But in reality, the Democrat establishment gets the award in my opinion — AS — this is truly a scandal based on a coverup.

Known as lies. To wit…

@Scott Jennings KY  just dismantled a CNN panel as they attempted to defend Joe Biden’s legacy:

“I think he’s going to leave office in disgrace.” “The Hunter Biden pardon was disgraceful. He’s going to be remembered largely for inflation and for the disastrous Afghanistan pullout. And I think as we continue to we’re just getting the first draft of this now.”

“But as we continue to learn about the massive cover up that went on, not about his health, but about his mental acuity to cover that up, the efforts, that were undertaken by the White House staff, by his family, not in the last couple of months, but for all four years. I think it’s going to be a really ugly chapter.”

“I think we still don’t know the full extent of what they did to try to hide what they’ve been doing over in the West Wing.”

This is a must listen to Armstrong and Getty excerpt. Wow. The Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall. So here is an unlocked version:

  • “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge: Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.” (TOVINA.COM| Posted Below)

WSJ ARTICLE:

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.

His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.

The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.

The small correction foreshadowed how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen —were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.

Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. “They body him to such a high degree,” a person who witnessed it said, adding that the “hand holding” is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier .

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.

Many of those who criticized Biden’s insularity said his system nonetheless kept his agenda on track.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden “earned the most accomplished record of any modern commander in chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives.” Bates, who rejected the notion that Biden has declined, added that the president has often solicited opinions from outside experts, which has informed his policymaking.

He said it is the job of senior White House staff to have high-level meetings regularly and that they were executing Biden’s agenda at his direction.

He also said that staff alerted the president to “significant” negative news stories. Bernal, via the White House press office, declined to comment.

‘Good Days And Bad Days’

The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg , a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble.

Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.

The structure was also designed to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.

The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary .

Biden, staffed with advisers since he became a senator at age 30, came to the White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long-serving aides who knew him and Washington so well that they could be particularly effective proxies. They didn’t tolerate criticism of Biden’s performance or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came to the president’s decision to run for a second term.

Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.

They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to people who received the message directly from White House aides.

Ideally, the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.

The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

That’s what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.

“I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.

After the disastrous withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans dead, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about the administration lacking a “clear-eyed view” of the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government’s durability. It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken , who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman. Shortly after, Smith got an apologetic call from Biden. It was the only phone call Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, Smith said.

“The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of a vital section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes broad national security surveillance powers. Biden’s senior advisers and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue, and he praised the collaboration.

But Biden wasn’t part of the conversation. “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” said Himes, who took office in 2009. Congress extended the surveillance authority for two years instead of the administration’s goal of five years.

Bates said that in every administration, some in Washington would prefer to spend more time with the president and that Biden put significant effort into promoting his legislative agenda.

One lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed that the president lacked stamina and heavily relied on his staff: Sen. Joe Manchin , the West Virginia Democrat-turned-independent who held up chunks of Biden’s legislative agenda during the first half of Biden’s term. Manchin said the job required a level of energy that he wasn’t sure Biden had been able to sustain.

“I just thought that maybe the president just lost that fight,” Manchin said in an interview. “The ability to continue to stay on, just grind it, grind it, grind it.”

Instead of Biden directing follow up, Manchin noticed that Biden’s staff played a much bigger role driving his agenda than he had experienced in other administrations. Manchin referred to them as the “eager beavers”—a group that included then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain . “They were going, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” Manchin said.

Klain, who was chief of staff for Biden’s first two years in office, said that “the agenda and pace” of the White House was at the “president’s direction and leadership.”

Dealing With Advisers

Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.

One top cabinet member met one-on-one with the president at most twice in the first year and rarely in small groups, another former senior cabinet aide said.

Multiple former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in the policymaking process. Some of them said it was hard for them to discern to what degree Biden was insulated because of his age versus his preference for a powerful inner circle.

Bates said Biden has daily conversations with members of his cabinet. Several cabinet secretaries contacted the Journal at the White House’s request to attest to the smooth operations between their agencies and the White House. They said Biden would call them individually on the phone when seeking information or to give direction.

“I spoke with him whenever we needed his guidance or his help,” said Denis McDonough , Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs and former chief of staff to Obama. “A lot of times it was him reaching out to us.”

Most often, however, they dealt with the president’s advisers, not the president himself, some of them said.

“If I had an issue or I needed attention on something, I had multiple avenues to explore to raise the issue,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “You don’t always have to raise the issue with the president.”

Vilsack, who also served as the agriculture secretary under Obama, said that presidents should primarily get involved when there’s a dispute between agencies.

Obama would often meet with smaller groups of cabinet members to hash out a policy debate, former administration officials said.

But that often wasn’t the experience under Biden’s administration. Instead, cabinet members most often met alone or with a member of the president’s senior staff, including Brainard, the economic adviser, or National Security Adviser Sullivan. The senior adviser would then bring the issue to the president and report back, former administration officials said.

Former administration officials said it often didn’t seem like Biden had his finger on the pulse.

Traditionally, presidents have more frequent interactions with certain cabinet secretaries—often Treasury, Defense and State—than others.

But Treasury Secretary Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with the president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions were more rare, and she typically dealt with the NEC or with the president’s advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions.

Some current and former administration officials said they would have expected a closer relationship between the two.

Bates, the White House spokesman, said Biden “deeply values Secretary Yellen’s expertise and counsel” and is “grateful for her service.” The Treasury Department declined to comment.

Defense Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people familiar with the relationship said.

During the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally behind closed doors.

Officials familiar with these meetings said they helped cabinet members to understand the commander in chief’s intentions directly, instead of being filtered through others, such as Sullivan, the national security adviser.

But in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.

Bates disputed that there was any decline in regular contact or attendance to presidential daily briefings, adding that Austin “is a fixture in these briefings and they speak often.”

A Pentagon spokesman said Biden frequently called Austin on the phone for matters that varied from urgent to lower in priority.

Biden has a close relationship with Secretary of State Blinken, whom he has known for decades, former administration officials said.

Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama held 19 and Trump held 25, according to data compiled by former CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller.

Early in his vice presidency during the Obama administration, Biden sought to gather cabinet leaders once a week, saying in a speech that the synergy brought about by the regular meetings made the government more competent.

The White House said Biden meets with smaller groups of his agency heads and that the contemporary work environment means full cabinet meetings can be fewer and farther between.

In the fall of 2023, Biden faced a major test when Hur, the special counsel, wanted to interview him. The president wanted to do it, and his top aides felt that his willingness to sit down with investigators set up a favorable contrast with Trump, who stonewalled the probe into why classified documents appeared at Mar-a-Lago, according to people familiar with the sessions.

The prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation. During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him, the person said.

A White House official pushed back on the notion that Biden’s age showed in prep, saying that the concerns that arose during those sessions were related to Biden’s tendency to over-share.

The actual interview didn’t go well. Transcripts showed multiple blunders, including that Biden didn’t initially recall that in prep sessions he had been shown his own handwritten memo arguing against a surge of troops in Afghanistan.

The report—one of just a few lengthy interviews with Biden over the past four years—concluded with a recommendation that Biden not be prosecuted for having classified documents in his home because a jury was likely to view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Insulated On Campaign

Biden’s team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden’s re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him that attendees shouldn’t expect to have a free ranging question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden would answer.

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

These aides, which include Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance, the people said. They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.

The White House said that the work by staff to guide Biden through events is standard for high-level officials.

People who witnessed it felt differently. In the past, aides performing these duties were often on their phones, chatting with other people or fetching something from a car or a computer nearby, they said.

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.

By the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

On July 13, Biden held an uncomfortable call with a group of Democratic lawmakers called the New Democrat Coalition, aimed at reassuring them about his ability to stay in the race.

The president told participants that polling showed he was doing fine. He became angry when challenged, according to lawmakers on the call. At one point, Biden looked up and abruptly told the group he had to go to church. Some lawmakers on the call believed someone behind the camera was shutting it down.

Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.

Jimmy Carter Lies About His “Tea Bagging” (Flashback)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted December 2, 2010

NewsBusters has a story about a recent interview on NPR (11-30-2010) where Jimmy Carter said he never criticized the Tea Party:

REHM: Last question, very briefly, what do you think of the Tea Party movement?

CARTER: You know, I never have criticized the Tea Party movement because, strangely enough, I capitalized on the same kind of situation politically that has made the Tea Party successful — that is, an extreme dissatisfaction with what was going on in Washington. Because I came along right after Watergate and right after the Vietnam lost and right after the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so I capitalized on that, and I was elected over some very wonderful people who were U.S. senators and immersed in the Washington scene.

…(read more)…

In case you didn’t catch it, the interview/video at the top refutes this NPR interview.

So what about those signs that Brian Williams mentions? Not a lot of people realize this, but most of the signs with connections of Obama to Hitler are actually from what I term as a political cult. It just so happens this cult is a Democratic one. For instance, as a reminder, remember this exchange?

So, since most of these sign wielding nuts are actually Democrats, where does that leave Carter’s critique?

In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….

Read more at newer links: My Updated Post | Slate

 

What are all those signs about? Is there some sort of study of them done to find out if there is a percentage of them that are racially tinged?

UCLA study: Most tea party signs not racist

A study conducted by a UCLA grad student at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington contains some bad news for one of the mainstream media’s favorite narratives: the old ‘racist teabaggers’ meme.

Conversely, quantitative observation showed that the alleged racism was not prominent at the rally, at least not as far as signage is concerned. And to think Obamacrats wasted all those race cards for nothin’.

[….]

The investigation showed only 25% of signs expressing antagonism towards the President himself, only 5% touching on the President’s ethnicity or faith, and a piddly 1% promoting ‘Birtherism’.

I presume the 1% was newly anointed ‘birther’ Jake Tapper, respected journalist of ABC News – or once respected until he had the temerity to mention the President’s long form birth certificate the other day.

The teabag obsessed Obama apologists at MSNBC and the New York Times will no doubt be bitterly disappointed to learn that despite the breathless hype, racism no more typifies the tea party movement than honest unslanted analysis typifies their political coverage.

This study didn’t stop the questionable signs and ask if they were Lyndon LaRouche followers. Here is another story — old news, but needed for this recent news:

NEWSBUSTERS H/T:

NewsBusters reported Thursday, a UCLA graduate student has published a study debunking the myth that the Tea Party is racist.

On Monday, Gretchen Carlson invited the study’s author on “Fox & Friends” to do what every news outlet ought to, namely, tell the truth about what the movement that is radically changing the political landscape is really all about.

[….]

Isn’t it interesting how easily this study was done?

As Carlson asked Ekins, why haven’t any news outlets, apart from Fox News and conservative websites, done any investigation into the allegations of racism within this movement to see if they were at all true?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question, for media have been trying to either dismiss or demonize the Tea Party since its inception.

THE VIDEO IS GONE, BUT THE TRANSCRIPT IS BELOW:

GRETCHEN CARLSON, HOST: Well, Brian, speaking of the Tea Party, the movement has been under attack since it started. Liberal members of the media and politicians have come out calling it racist.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANEANE GAROFALO: They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about.

KEITH OLBERMANN: That’s right.

GAROFALO: They don’t know the history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. 

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And you see folks waving tea bags around. 

HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Carrying swastikas, symbols like that to a town hall meeting on healthcare.

FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man. 

HBO’s BILL MAHER: The Teabaggers, they’re not a movement. They’re a cult.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: But is the racist label accurate? A grad student at UCLA just completed a study on the Tea Party and the signs that are carried at the rallies and she came up with a much different conclusion. Joining me now to share her finding is Emily Ekins. Good morning to you, Emily

EMILY EKINS, UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT: Good to be with you. 

CARLSON: So, you went to a rally. You decided to take photographs of about 250 signs, and what did you find out? 

EKINS:Well, what I did is I tried to take a picture of every visible sign I could find and I found that over 50% of the signs were about limited government and lower spending. And only about 6% of the signs were controversial in nature. 

CARLSON: How tough was it for you to go and take these photos and come up with that conclusion? 

EKINS: You know, it was actually pretty straight forward. I’m surprised more people haven’t done this. I just went to the rally, I walked in a systemic fashion, you know, row by row, took a picture of every visible sign and then I categorized them. And I should say that I was very conscientious that any sign that, you know, could be construed as controversial, meaning they had undertones about immigration or race or Islam, you know, I was sure to include those into these controversial categories. But frankly, they just, there weren’t that many, and so it added up to six. 

CARLSON: Why do you think that your test results differ from the perception of the mainstream media and those clips that we just saw? 

EKINS: Well, honestly, I think it has everything to do with your method and your approach. I think what often happens is people go to these events, these rallies, and they’re either attracted or repelled by various signs. And if you just cover a couple of signs no matter how objective you try to be, you’re just, you can’t generalize everybody that’s there by a couple of signs. And so the method needs to be systematic that when we go to these events we need to look at all the signs. We need to say, we need to see what all the signs are telling us. And I think that method revealed something very different than a method that just looks at a few signs. 

CARLSON. Here was a quote from NAACP Ben Jealous on the Tea Parties. “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there’s no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement.” I mean, I guess he’s speaking to the 6% of the signs that you found that were questionable, but you still say that’s a tiny percentage in what the overall message was. 

EKINS: Yes, I mean overwhelmingly, the message is about limited government. At this particular rally that I, that I did conduct the analysis at. 

CARLSON: I know that you want to do further studies, and I find it actually amazing that nobody else has done what you chose to do. So hats off to you. But I’m interested in knowing, you’re at UCLA. What grade did you get? 

EKINS: Well, actually I’m a PhD student, so grades work differently there. This is my research for my dissertation, and actually my advisors, you know, they’re very encouraging and seeking academic truth. So they were, they were pleased with kind of the new approach and they’re very encouraging. 

CARLSON: Well, that’s very good to hear. Congratulations to you, Emily Ekins, she is a UCLA graduate student. She decided to go to that Tea Party movement and decide see what the signs are really all about. Thanks for sharing your findings with us, Emily. 

EKINS: Sure. Thank you. 

So, is this merely another nail in the “worst one’s” irrelevance coffin? I say yes, but I am sure there are NPR fans out there that disagree with me.

REASON.COM did a bang-up job in dealing with the issue:

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”

Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.

Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv, we saw some stupid signs — though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.

So did we find that the Tea Party was motivated by race, by the fact that we now have a black president? Did it seem as if their stated concerns about health care reform and a ballooning national debt simply a smokescreen, designed to concealing a racist agenda? Here is what we found.