Tom Cotton

TikTok Chinese Trojan Horse Run By Former CIA

alayham — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 11:49:48 +0000

TikTok Chinese Trojan Horse Run By Former CIA alayham Sat, 02/10/2024 - 12:49

TikTok is once again under public scrutiny, this time for concerns about child safety. Yet a much bigger issue is being swept under the rug: that it is increasingly controlled by the US national security state.
The post TikTok Chinese Trojan Horse Run By Former CIA appeared first on MintPress News.

Link

TikTok Chinese Trojan Horse Run By Former CIA

Tags

Source

MintPress

The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade

alayham — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 12:47:04 +0000

The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade alayham Thu, 06/24/2021 - 14:47

American Conservative, June 24, 2021 The ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Charade How government and media use the phrase to suppress opposition.by by James Bovard Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” report last week declared that “enhancing faith in American democracy” requires “finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories.” In recent decades, conspiracy […]
The post The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade appeared first on James Bovard.

Link

The “Conspiracy Theory” Charade

Source

James Bovard

A Man Is Only As Good As His Word? So How Do Closet Cases, Like Lindsey Graham Survive In Electoral Politics?

alayham — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 20:00:00 +0000

A Man Is Only As Good As His Word? So How Do Closet Cases, Like Lindsey Graham Survive In Electoral Politics? alayham Mon, 09/21/2020 - 22:00

I'm gay. When I realized it, I was living in Amsterdam. I went to a psychologist and told him. He looked at me oddly and said, basically, "So? You need me to give you the addresses of gay bars?" Then I flew to the U.S., for my first visit back home in 4 years, to tell my mother. Her response was to tell me I couldn't borrow her wigs. Years later my first corporate job was working for a gay man. My sexuality never held back my career and I rose to be president of the parent company. I'm glad I never went down the closet road. People in closets live a life reflexively and usually increasingly dishonest. They lie about who they are, what they are and, eventually, about everything and start living a life where serial dishonestly becomes the essence of being, more so than any semblance of honesty. It's the slipperiest of slopes to start down and so, so tragic for so many people. It's the slope poor Lindsey Graham felt he had to go down if he was going to be a successful politician in South Carolina. And, his life has been one gigantic lie, both professionally and personally. "Everyone knows" and even colleagues and acquaintances who find him likable, simpatico and amusing, all tend to pity him. And now it may be catching up with him politically, as an unlikely Democratic opponent has him locked in a what should be an easy reelection campaign but is basically tied and too close to call. On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim wrote that 4 and a half years ago Lindsey "sat across a conference table from his colleagues and issued them a dare. 'I want you to use my words against me,' said Graham, a South Carolina Republican with a flair for drama. Pointing with his index finger, Graham continued: 'If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.' On Saturday, Graham was singing a different tune, pledging support for President Trump in 'any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.' The stark turnabout from 2016 marked the latest chapter in Graham’s dramatic reinvention of himself during the Trump presidency, morphing from an old-school Senate institutionalist and bipartisan dealmaker into a stalwart soldier for the president’s agenda." Democrats and other opponents of The Donald very much would like to take Graham up on his offer-- to hold his words against him. I don't know how effective this Lincoln Project ad will be with South Carolina voters, but I suspect someone will figure out exactly how to hold his words against him in a way that will cause him no end of political pain. After all, no one likes a liar... well, except for Republicans who apparently love liars: "Graham," our Post duo reminded us, "is chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee charged with processing Supreme Court nominees, and he is in the midst of a competitive reelection campaign that could factor closely into the fight for control of the upper chamber. His comments Saturday, coming after less-decisive statements in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday, amounted to the latest indication of how Republican leaders are rallying quickly around a strategy of seeking to fill her seat this year. That prospect has stoked widespread outrage among Senate Democrats, who are calling Republicans hypocrites for the move after blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 because they said the president chosen by voters that fall should make the pick.

“There’s no doubt everything will be sort of on the table if we’re thrown into a world where you can’t trust somebody’s word and precedents get changed at will to fit your priorities of the moment,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in response to Graham’s decision to align behind Trump and go back on what he said in 2016. During Saturday’s call, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) used similar language, saying that if Senate Republicans move forward with whoever Trump nominates, “nothing is off the table for next year” should Democrats win control of the chamber. That appeared to be a reference to structural changes to the court proposed by liberal activists such as expanding the number of justices-- a proposal that has sparked some disagreements among Democrats. Republican leaders appeared determined to press ahead swiftly to fill the court vacancy with a conservative jurist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised Trump during a Friday phone call that his nominee would get a vote in the Senate, according to people familiar with their conversation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation. Trump told McConnell he liked Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit, according to two people briefed on the discussion. “We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices,” Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday. “We have this obligation, without delay!” ...Less clear is how rank-and-file Republican senators will respond, with many in tough reelection races in states where Trump is not popular. Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can afford to lose no more than three members in a confirmation vote, should the entire Democratic caucus unite against Trump's nominee. They have already lost one. “I do not believe that the Senate should vote on the nominee prior to the election,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is in a tough reelection fight, said in a statement. “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the President or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd.” Collins’s reservations contrasted sharply with the comments from Graham, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate. The contest has been tougher than many expected in a ruby-red state Trump won easily in 2016, with recent polls showing Democrat Jaime Harrison in close competition with Graham. Now Graham will be at the center of what will likely be one of the most contentious confirmation battles in history, affording him an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Trump. But some Democrats say his position could help amplify the arguments against his reelection. “A lot of folks miss the Lindsey of old-- and that’s why this race is so competitive,” said Steve Benjamin, the Democratic mayor of Columbia, S.C. “When it comes time to do what’s right and maybe not popular,” Benjamin said, “it can be difficult for some.” Harrison, one of his party's fast-rising African American stars, sounded similar notes. “My grandpa always said that a man is only as good as his word. Senator Graham, you have proven your word is worthless,” he wrote on Twitter.

Writing for The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere offered a glimpse into what Republican senators are saying in private and off the record. "Whispering Republicans," as he termed them, talk about how they hate The Donald and then back him in public-- to the media and, of course, with their votes. The GOP is absolutely one of the country's two spineless, jellyfish parties. "The secretly apostate Republican senators," wrote Dovere, "have two choices: They can support a president they think is a threat to American democracy while also violating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s invented 2016 rule about not confirming justices in an election year, or they can oppose Trump, enraging both him and their progressively cultish base while giving up what might be their last chance to secure a conservative majority for a generation." Notice The Donald's Chamber of Commerce retweet from Sunday morning, signally he's ready for war with Alaska senior Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is not up for reelection in November and is not up for giving Trump a third Supreme Court pick.

For McConnell, this is principle versus power, and the golden rule is “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” And it’s happening as the next generation of ambitious Republicans looks to a future in which Trumpism remains a dominant force within the party no matter what happens in November. Don’t expect many Republicans-- even those who want to stick it to Trump-- to be direct with their commitments. “If they try to shove something through, I think you’re going to see some of these Republicans who hate Trump fall on the horrible sword of ‘This country is dangerously divided right now; the hypocrisy is horrible; if we do something like this, it will tear the country apart,’” says Joe Walsh, the former Republican representative from Illinois, who briefly ran a primary campaign against Trump that went nowhere earlier this year. Based on conversations he’s had, Walsh estimates that, of the current Republican senators, “if you put a gun to their head privately, I would say more than 40 of the 53 would like to see him lose.” Walsh insists that Republicans didn’t want this vacancy-- not now. “This is political death for the Republicans,” he told me. This is not the time for Republicans to insist that they haven’t “seen the latest tweet.” This is where they either will or will not give Trump the boost that he needs weeks before the election. Now, more than ever, they are either with him or against him. “This,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, said on CNN last night, “is my colleagues’ moment of reckoning.” ...Senator Joni Ernst, in a tight reelection race in Iowa, said in July that she would support a nomination process if an opening occurred. But that puts her at odds with her fellow Iowa senator, Chuck Grassley, who said in August that he couldn’t support a confirmation in an election year if he was going to be consistent with the position he took in 2016. He stood then with McConnell’s adamant refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing after Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in 2016, though Garland was nominated nine months before Election Day. Of course, the question becomes whether Grassley will hold to his position now that the question is no longer theoretical. ...Late yesterday, I asked a former Republican House member what an anti-Trump Republican senator would do when facing a choice that sounds more out of a novel than anything Goethe might have come up with if he’d ever wandered around Capitol Hill. “The Republican senator,” said the person, who requested anonymity to speak directly about old colleagues, “will do what they must in the name of self-preservation.” “Guess what?” the former House member said of Graham. “He’s going to do it. You know he is. He’s up for reelection in South Carolina. He needs his base. He’ll flip on this.” McConnell, in his Rube Goldberg–machine statement explaining why Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the floor of the Senate but Obama’s didn’t, left the door open to having a vote in a potential lame-duck session after the election. Maybe it’ll all come down to Senator Mitt Romney, who is publicly offended by pretty much everything Trump stands for but whose spokesperson shot down rumors last night that he would oppose a confirmation before the election. Or maybe, if Mark Kelly wins his Senate race in Arizona, it will all hinge on a legal dispute over whether he would get to immediately be sworn into the seat because his opponent was appointed to it. Or maybe by then we’ll be in a country where the November 3 votes are taking weeks to count, rioters and militias are out on the streets, and, as in 2000, the election will head to the Supreme Court, which now is without a tiebreaker vote.In 2016, from the minute he learned of Scalia’s death, Obama knew that Republicans would try to prevent him from appointing a justice and flipping the balance to a 5–4 liberal majority. He nominated Garland anyway and threw himself into the fight, daring the GOP senators to oppose a middle-of-the-road, accomplished judge whom so many had voted for in his confirmation to a lower court. Working the phones for a few senators he dreamed might buck McConnell, he pleaded with them: Don’t do this. I remember speaking with one of the Republican senators struggling with breaking the process then. The senator, though torn, ultimately did not say anything publicly, and didn’t invite Garland in for a meeting. Last night, Obama closed his statement mourning Ginsburg with, “As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican senators are now called to apply that standard.” Don’t hold a confirmation hearing, he said. Always an institutionalist with his eye toward history, Obama was admitting that the process breakers had won. Now the question is, what else will Trump, the ultimate process breaker, win?

David Frum offered up 4 reasons to doubt McConnell’s power. He asked himself 4 questions:

• Does McConnell really command a Senate majority? The polls do not favor Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Thom Tillis--senators from Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina up for reelection this cycle. Yet these competitors may not be ready to attend their own funerals. They may regard voting against McConnell's Court grab as a heaven-sent chance to prove their independence from an unpopular president-- and to thereby save their own seats... (Martha McSally of Arizona, however, is likely a safe vote for McConnell. The deadest of the Senate's dead ducks surely must be focused on retaining national Republican support for her post-Senate career. Mitt Romney of Utah is a more open question: His strong sense of fairness will push him against confirmation; his consistent support for conservative judges will pull him in favor.) • Does McConnell really have a nominee to advance? Any last-minute Trump nominee will face a gantlet of opposition in the Senate, a firestorm of opposition in the country, and probably a lifetime of suspicion from the majority of the country. Can McConnell and Trump find an appointee willing to risk all that for the chance-- but not the guarantee-- of a Supreme Court seat? Specifically, can they find a woman willing to do it? The optics of replacing Ginsburg with a man may be too ugly even for the Trump administration. And if they can find a woman, can they find a woman sufficiently moderate-seeming to provide cover to anxious senators? The task may prove harder than immediately assumed. • Will Trump balk?Until now, judicial-nomination fights have mobilized Republicans and conservatives more than Democrats and liberals. The fight McConnell proposes may upset that pattern. Trump's hopes for reelection depend on suppressing votes and discouraging participation. The last thing he needs is a highly dramatic battle that could mobilize Democrats in states including Arizona and North Carolina-- even Georgia and Texas. The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different. • Will the conservative legal establishment play ball? The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020. But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight-- not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare. Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

Link

https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-man-is-only-as-good-as-his-word-…

Tags

Source

Down With Tyranny

An Ignorant, Racist US Senator

alayham — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:48:31 +0000

An Ignorant, Racist US Senator alayham Sat, 08/01/2020 - 02:48

Link

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/07/an-ignorant-racist-us-senator/

Tags

Source

Dissident Voice

GOP bill would punish Big Tech for censoring conservatives [Video]

alayham — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 06:22:17 +0000

GOP bill would punish Big Tech for censoring conservatives [Video] alayham Sat, 06/20/2020 - 08:22

As the race for the 2020 Presidential election resumes its full force, Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and others have been observed rather blatantly attempting to censor posts by their users, whether those posts be personally held “private” opinions or newspieces. Here at The Duran, we have felt these efforts deployed against us for years, and in an interesting confirmation of the giants’ power being used recklessly and foolishly, one of my own recent articles, entitled “Big Tech is trying to isolate us – Tucker Carlson snags Google‘ was enjoying a meteoric run on a pro-Trump group on Facebook, garnering over two thousand views in a matter of hours, got removed from the pro-Trump page under the notification that it “violated Community Standards.” What ‘Community Standards’ are those? “Don’t tell Big Tech what it does wrong?”
Apparently so. The piece is presently waiting in the wings for reposting to that group (though it appears on other less popularly used groups in Facebook without any problem. Perhaps the fact that the group in question has close to 800,000 active members – a number big enough to make some serious political noise – makes Big Tech’s “censor that!” flags go off.
Now, private companies generally do have the right to control their communications and PR, and they can bind their employees to non-disclosure and intellectual property agreements as a condition for employment. This is a protected right and there is nothing wrong with it. Using this definition perhaps, Big Tech social media firms may consider themselves as somehow “responsible” for the media that passes through their sites; that if it contains elements of danger to the life and limb of others, such as might be found on a page dedicated to Al Qaeda or ISIS, that this page would be taken down.
Indeed, we heard much of this kind of activity over recent years.
However, with the second term of President Obama, a new catchphrase became incorporated into social media discourse, a nebulous term known as “hate speech.” Now we hear all the time about efforts that “need to be made to stop all forms of hate, such as hate speech.”
An example of Facebook deleting a post that was actually not hate speech in any way.
This is the narrative being used even now, as the misuse of censorship by big tech firms is about to be challenged. The Deccan Chronicle, of , features a piece entitled, “If this US bill is passed, Google, Facebook could be sued for removing hateful posts.”
But what is “hateful?” Apparently it is anything in support of President Trump, Christianity, Traditional family values, one’s asserting that they are not racist and hence, will not support Black Lives Matter, and so on. In other words, conservative points of view.
Using our selected piece, examine this narrative [emphasis added]:

Four Republican senators introduced a bill Wednesday aimed at limiting legal protections of Big Tech platforms if they “selectively” suppress certain content, stepping up a political battle with social media.
Senator Josh Hawley said his measure, if enacted, “gives users the right to sue if the big platforms enforce their terms unfairly or unequally.”
The bill comes weeks after President Donald Trump accused social platforms of suppressing conservative political voices and signed an executive order which could eliminate the liability shield of online services for content posted by third parties, despite doubts about its enforceability.
The Hawley Bill, co-sponsored by fellow Republicans Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton and Mike Braun, would revise the “Section 230” legal protection mechanism for online services if they fail to act “in good faith” to moderate content.
The bill would strip the liability protection to services that “restrict access to or availability of material against a user by employing an algorithm that selectively enforces” its policies.
The legislation and executive order stem from claims by Trump and his allies that social media platforms are biased, despite his own large following on Twitter and other platforms.

But look at that last little zinger, “despite [Trump’s] own large following on Twitter…” This is not telling the full story about why the President signed the executive order.
Twitter tried to “fact check” the President, employing a “fact checker” who turned out to be a virulently anti-Trump person, and who made an allegation that was easily disproven.
Twitter’s attempt was reported this way on Wired:

What prompted Twitter to finally break the seal was a two-tweet tirade about the supposed dangers of expanding vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

· May 26, 2020

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..

….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!

Later that evening, Twitter added a note to the bottom of the tweet: a big exclamation mark and a message reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” read the bold heading. Beneath it came some bullet points on vote-by-mail, followed by a curated feed of tweets picking apart Trump’s various recent claims about it.

Why was this the moment when Twitter finally took action? The company says that neither of Trump’s incendiary Tuesday threads violated the platform’s rules. But the mail-in ballot tweet fell into a gray area of misleading content that the company believes is so important that it must be corrected, a Twitter spokesperson said. The platform rolled out its new fact-checking approach on May 11, and until this week had only applied it to misleading tweets about Covid-19. (For tweets that the company considers not just misleading but dangerously so, the response is deletion. Most notably, Twitter recently took down posts by the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela that promoted quack medicine.)

The Twitter spokesperson said that flagging Trump’s vote-by-mail tweet was the debut of a similar policy to protect “civic integrity” by correcting false information about voting or the census. Twitter didn’t say so, but it surely helped that this particular tweet contained one nugget of rock-solid, certifiably false information: the claim that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, ballots are going only to registered voters.

But politics is full of rhetoric. In some people’s cases, such rhetoric is full on falsehoods. In Trump world it isn’t. The man speaks with a very broad brush, to be sure, but even Twitter’s own claim that the ballots only would go to registered voters hides the likelihood that many of these registered voters are in fact, deceased, nonexistent, or in some way, disingenuous. The argument can certainly be made in both directions.

But does a social media company get to moderate such debates? Politics is never a game of only the truth. In the past it has been the responsibility of every citizen in the United States to reason this information out for themselves. So why is Big Tech stepping in like an overprotective (liberal) parent and doing things like deleting politically conservative posts, but then going all in to support leftist causes like Black Lives Matter? As I earlier noted in my own experience, I have endured not only the removal of the newspiece I described earlier (really a good read and listen, too!), but in the last year, Facebook completely shut down my old account because I used it as a base from which to share and distribute newspieces I write, both for The Duran, and for a site called USA Really, as well as my own private blog. Facebook cut me off from well over one thousand contacts without explanation, and without reply to my appeals. Were it not for the fact that I had a secondary account on that platform already in existence, I would not be able to post. In fact, Facebook has prohibited me from creating any new accounts at all. Period.
That is some pretty rough censorship, and I did nothing more provocative than write the pieces you can find on the Duran. Most everything I have ever written for publication is here. Read and see for yourself.
The Senate is taking action. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) introduced a bill to empower Americans to sue Big Tech companies who act in bad faith by selectively censoring political opinion. Sen. Hawley’s website continues:

The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act provides that Big Tech companies who want to receive section 230 immunity must bind themselves contractually to a duty of good faith.
Under this bill:

Users could sue the major Big Tech companies for breaching their contractual duty of good faith;

The duty of good faith would contractually prohibit Big Tech from:
Discriminating when enforcing the terms of service they write (just like police and prosecutors are not supposed to discriminate when enforcing the law);

Failing to honor their promises;

Big Tech companies who breach their duty of good faith would have to pay $5,000 or actual damages, whichever is higher, plus attorney’s fees to each user who prevails.

This is a beginning. Perhaps Facebook took notice of this, since the bill was put forth on the very day they took down my post, because since then, I have been enabled to make other posts, so far without interruption. Google apparently has jumped about this too. For further and very amusing explanation we turn to Dr Steven Turley, who gives his own usual superb explanation and analysis on the situation.

The post GOP bill would punish Big Tech for censoring conservatives [Video] appeared first on The Duran.

Link

http://theduran.com/gop-bill-would-punish-big-tech-for-censoring-conservatives-…

Source

The Duran

Hong Kong’s ‘pro-democracy’ movement allies with far-right US politicians that seek to crush Black Lives Matter

alayham — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 23:15:41 +0000

Hong Kong’s ‘pro-democracy’ movement allies with far-right US politicians that seek to crush Black Lives Matter alayham Wed, 06/10/2020 - 01:15

As a Hong Kong protest leader promotes far-right condemnations of US anti-racism demonstrations and activists shut down a Black Lives…
The post Hong Kong’s ‘pro-democracy’ movement allies with far-right US politicians that seek to crush Black Lives Matter appeared first on The Grayzone.

Link

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/09/hong-kongs-far-right-us-politicians-crush-bl…

Tags

Source

Grayzone Project

Republicans Are Desperate To Shift The Blame For Their Catastrophic Response To The Pandemic-- How About China?

alayham — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Republicans Are Desperate To Shift The Blame For Their Catastrophic Response To The Pandemic-- How About China? alayham Sun, 04/19/2020 - 18:00

Above you see a Joe Biden ad that will run in 6 swing states that both sides think will determine the 2020 election, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin-- cumulatively 111 electoral votes. (Bernie should tell Biden that he's making a mistake by not targeting Ohio and Iowa. And he might consider including Georgia and Montana as well.)As NBC News' Sahil Kapur reported yesterday, the pandemic has turned "China" into a big campaign issue, one where even a corpse-like Biden can crush the credibility-free Trump. Trump's SuperPAC, America First Action, fired the first shot last week with $10 million worth of dishonest ads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania attempting to project his own malfeasance with China onto Biden. The ad above is the Biden campaign's response. This ad by American Bridge-- $15 million worth but pretty weak-- is also on the air in swing states:The context Kapur gave the story is that "The COVID-19 crisis has rocketed to the forefront of voter concerns as the official U.S. death toll tops 33,000 and sets up a battle over which candidate, Trump or Biden, can address public concerns about China as favorable opinions of the country nosedived in Gallup tracking polls. A Harris poll taken April 3-5 found that 72 percent of Americans believe China inaccurately reported the impacts of the coronavirus. It found that 69 percent favor Trump's trade policies against China and most want him to take a tougher position with that nation. A majority of Americans even said China should be required to pay other countries to compensate for damage and suffering caused by the spread of the virus. In the 2016 election, Trump successfully weaponized misgivings about China's trade practices, insisting that previous U.S. presidents, including his opponent Hillary Clinton's husband, had allowed the country to rip off Americans. He has slapped tariffs on Chinese products, which have at times drawn public resistance, in pursuit of overhauling trade relations with the country. Trump's strategy is to place a simple contrast in the minds of voters. In a recent fundraising email to supporters, he proclaimed, 'I am TOUGH ON CHINA and Sleepy Joe Biden is WEAK ON CHINA.'" But Trump's strategy is backfiring on him.Snopes did some fact-checkin' last week:

In mid-April 2020, social media users shared a comment made by U.S. President Donald Trump at an April 14 press briefing and contrasted it with a previous tweet of Trump’s in an effort to highlight the president’s flip-flopping narrative on the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020.During the April press briefing, amid strong criticism of his own administration’s response to the pandemic, Trump announced he was planning to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), strongly criticizing it for taking China’s assurances about its handling of the coronavirus outbreak “at face value” and for praising China’s “so-called transparency” in that regard.In light of that, CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump about a January 2020 tweet in which he, too, praised the Chinese government’s “transparency” in handling the crisis at that early juncture.

Snope contrasted that Trump lie with this Trump lie to find the statement true and the Trump[ist claims flat out false.Meanwhile, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman noted that the Republican Party Blame China strategy is being undermined by Trump's bumbling and incompetence. Voters blames the horribly dysfunctional GOP for the failed response to the pandemic-- which has led to more deaths in America and in any other country-- and with continued failure, to even bleaker prospects for the future. Martin and Haberman wrote that its a botched attempt "to divert attention from the administration’s heavily criticized response to the coronavirus by pinning the blame on China... Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election." Hence the deceitful campaign ad from Trump's SuperPAC... and it's a party wide endeavor.

Republican senators locked in difficult races are preparing commercials condemning China. Conservatives with future presidential ambitions of their own, like Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, are competing to see who can talk tougher toward the country where the virus first emerged. Party officials are publicly and privately brandishing polling data in hopes Mr. Trump will confront Beijing....But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan-- the leader of the party himself.Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping at a moment when the United States is relying on China’s manufacturers for lifesaving medical supplies, Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.Even as the president tries to rebut criticism of his slow response to the outbreak by highlighting his January travel restrictions on China, he has repeatedly called Mr. Xi a friend and said “we are dealing in good faith” with the repressive government. He also dropped his periodic references to the disease as “the China virus” after a telephone call with Mr. Xi.Yet in private, he has vented about the country. Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said he informed Mr. Trump in a Thursday telephone conversation that the meat processing plant in South Dakota suffering a virus outbreak is owned by a Chinese conglomerate. The president responded, “I’m getting tired of China,” according to Mr. Cramer.It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump’s conflicted messaging on China will hurt him with voters, who have repeatedly seen the president argue both sides of issues without suffering the harm that another politician would. And while Mr. Trump’s team knows that his own words will be used against him, they believe they can contrast his history favorably with that of Mr. Biden.On Tuesday, at his daily briefing, Mr. Trump was candid about the transactional rationale behind his stance toward China. Pressed on how he could criticize the World Health Organization for what he called pushing “China’s misinformation,” after he had also lavished praise on Beijing’s purported transparency, he responded, “Well, I did a trade deal with China, where China is supposed to be spending $250 billion in our country.”“I’d love to have a good relationship with China,” he added.On Friday, however, he incorrectly posited that China must have the most deaths from the coronavirus-- the United States does-- and later said, “I’m not happy with China.”...Candidates of both parties have targeted China in past campaigns. But with the United States entering a presidential election season as the Wuhan-borne contagion spreads across the country, the rhetoric this time is far more pointed-- with concern growing that it will fan xenophobia and discrimination against Asian-Americans.It is especially striking to see a primarily internationalist Democratic Party and the traditionally business-friendly G.O.P. attempt to portray the other as captive to Beijing-- yet that only illustrates the electoral incentives at play....Trump’s clashing comments on China illustrate not only his unreliability as a political messenger but also his longstanding ambivalence over how to approach the world’s second-largest economy. He ran for president four years ago vowing to get tough with China, but his ambition was not to isolate the Chinese but to work with them-- and especially for the United States to make more money from the relationship.This goal has prompted him to often lavish flattery on Mr. Xi, most memorably when Mr. Trump rhapsodized about the way they bonded over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2017.The president’s hopes for securing a major trade agreement with China have been reinforced by a coterie of his advisers, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who have often prevailed in internal battles over White House hard-liners.But with the coronavirus death toll growing and the economy at a standstill, polls show that Americans have never viewed China more negatively.In a recent 17-state survey conducted by Mr. Trump’s campaign, 77 percent of voters agreed that China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, and 79 percent of voters indicated they did not think China had been truthful about the extent of infections and deaths, according to a Republican briefed on the poll.Yet those polling numbers also come as 65 percent of Americans say they believe that Mr. Trump was too late responding to the outbreak, according to a Pew Research Center survey this past week.More ominous for the president are some private Republican surveys that show him losing ground in key states like Michigan, where one recent poll has him losing by double digits, according to a Republican strategist who has seen it.So as Mr. Biden unites the Democratic Party, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers are flagging and G.O.P. senators up for re-election find themselves significantly outraised by their Democratic rivals. That has led to a growing urgency in Republican ranks that the president should shelve his hopes for a lucrative rapprochement with China.“At this moment in time a trade deal is not the right topic of discussion,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, who said the pandemic had highlighted the country’s reliance on China in the same painful fashion that the oil crisis of the 1970s revealed how it was at the mercy of the Middle East. “This has exposed our dependency on China for P.P.E. and for critical drugs.”...Few Republicans have been more outspoken than Mr. Cotton, an Arkansan who was warning about the virus at the start of the year when few lawmakers were paying attention, and has been urging Senate candidates to make China a centerpiece of their campaigns.“China unleashed this pandemic on the world and they should pay the price,” Mr. Cotton said. “Congress and the president should work together to hold China accountable.”Fortified by private polling his campaign conducted last year for his own re-election showing bipartisan disdain for China, Mr. Cotton’s top aides approached aides to Mr. Trump’s campaign last month and told them they planned to air an ad in Ohio, a few days before its scheduled primary, attacking Mr. Biden over China. But, according to Republicans familiar with the conversation, Mr. Trump’s campaign expressed little interest in coordinating with them.Now, though, Mr. Trump’s campaign is effectively repurposing Mr. Cotton’s ad and lashing Mr. Biden in a commercial targeting the former vice president and his son.The super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, America First, is airing ads on the same theme in swing states, showing video of Mr. Biden in 2011 saying that “a rising China is a positive development.”And the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., posted the spot on Twitter and sought to stamp a new nickname on the former vice president: “BeijingBiden.”Brian O. Walsh, the president of America First Action, said the strategy builds on years of voter concerns about China.“The China piece of this was part of the overall thinking far before coronavirus, because we knew its potency and its relevance,” Mr. Walsh said. “This just made it more potent and more relevant.”

Link

https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2020/04/republicans-are-desperate-to-shift…

Tags

Source

Down With Tyranny

US pushes conspiracy theory on China’s coronavirus death toll to deflect from Trump administration failures

alayham — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 03:05:43 +0000

US pushes conspiracy theory on China’s coronavirus death toll to deflect from Trump administration failures alayham Thu, 04/02/2020 - 05:05

A widely disseminated and highly dubious story asserting China concealed tens of thousands of deaths originated from a US government…
The post US pushes conspiracy theory on China’s coronavirus death toll to deflect from Trump administration failures appeared first on The Grayzone.

Link

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/01/us-conspiracy-theory-on-china-coronavirus-tr…

Tags

Source

Grayzone Project

Who Is More Likely To Have Been Created In A Right-Wing Super-Lab, Fox-bot Marie Bartiromo Or Arkansas Closet Case Tom Cotton?

alayham — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Who Is More Likely To Have Been Created In A Right-Wing Super-Lab, Fox-bot Marie Bartiromo Or Arkansas Closet Case Tom Cotton? alayham Wed, 02/19/2020 - 06:00

The Democratic Party is giving far right extremist crackpot Tom Cotton a free ride this cycle, not bothering to run an opponent against him, although Dan Whitfield, who calls himself a "progressive independent," is running on an independent line. Cotton has raised $7,583,447 for his reelection campaign. Whitfield hasn't raised the $5,000 that would trigger an FEC report. Cotton, who had presidential ambitions before he was outed as a closet case, is a garden variety Trumpist with nothing to recommend him.Sunday, the NY Times noted that he's been spreading a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was manufactured in a high-security Chinese biochemical weapons lab near Wuhan, although he admits he has no proof of this. The Times noted that "The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government. The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government." It looks like another psychopath from TrumpWorld, Stephen Bannon, started it.Cotton has been carrying on about it for weeks and Maria Bartiromo had him on her show Sunday to spread it further, despite the rumor having been debunked by the scientific community. Yesterday, for example, Chemical Biology Professor Richard Ebright (Rutgers University) told the Washington Post that "there's absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered. The possibility that this was a deliberately released bio-weapon can be firmly excluded."Cotton on Fox: "We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all." This of course, is a perfect explanation to a typical low-IQ Fox TV viewer incapable of independent thought.Russian versions of Tom Cotton are blaming the U.S. in the same way he is blaming China.

[I]n Russia the misinformation has been particularly pointed. Russia’s spin doctors have capitalized on the fear and confusion of the epidemic to point the blame at the United States, following a well-established pattern of previous Russian disinformation campaigns and evoking a Cold War-era plot by the KGB to paint HIV as a U.S. biological weapon... [I]n Russia these theories are appearing on prominent mainstream news discussion shows such as Big Game and Time Will Tell on Channel 1, rather than just being confined to squalid corners of the internet. In late January, the firebrand leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia party told a Moscow radio station that he thought coronavirus was an American bioweapon or a big plot by pharmaceutical companies to get richer....The overarching theme of the stories that appear across the Russian media, from fringe websites to prime-time television, is that the virus is the product of U.S. labs, intended to kneecap China’s economic development. Some articles have flirted with the idea that Bill Gates or Kremlin nemesis George Soros might have had a hand in the outbreak. In one of the more bizarre turns, a host on Russia’s state-funded Channel 1 floated the idea that the name “coronavirus,” is a veiled reference to its American origins, because U.S. President Donald Trump once handed out crowns at beauty pageants, and corona means crown in Latin. (Coronaviruses are, in fact, a well-established group of viruses whose name is a reference to their shape.)There is, however, no agreement between Russia’s propagandists about who foretold the virus, with some claiming it was Nostradamus, others say it was the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, or maybe even Stephen Hawking.The Russian messaging fits a now well-established pattern in that it doesn’t look to persuade audiences of a single alternative truth. That would take effort, planning, and persuasion. Modern-day Russian propaganda has instead been described by the Rand Corp. as a “firehose of falsehood,” a steady stream of underdeveloped, sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories intended to exhaust and confuse viewers, making them question the very notion of objective truth itself.Right now, the main audience is largely domestic, with a sprinkling of conspiratorial reports across the different language services of Sputnik, the more tabloid of Russia’s international broadcasters. The conspiracy theories haven’t featured prominently on English-language Russian government-backed international broadcasters such as RT and Sputnik, however, according to Bret Schafer, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy who studies disinformation. While these channels have historically played around the edges of conspiracy theories, “they still want that veneer of being a legit international broadcaster,” Schafer said....[W]hile the Russian media has speculated wildly about the virus, the Russian government has taken the threat seriously, closing its land borders with China and checking the temperatures of reporters and officials at events attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two people in Russia were diagnosed with the virus, having contracted it on trips to China, but they are reported to have since recovered. While disinformation doesn’t appear to have hamstrung Russia’s response to the virus, the lasting danger may be in its continued erosion of trust in the notion of truth itself.“Where I do think is it’s unhelpful is that it flies in the face of facts and science,” said Schafer. “The real danger is more the impact it has on trust in information.”

I wonder if someone has been whispering in Trump's ear yet that this could be a plausible excuse to cancel the 2020 elections.

Link

https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2020/02/who-is-more-likely-to-have-been-cr…

Tags

Source

Down With Tyranny

Coronavirus: Media and Politicians Take Anti-China Fear Mongering to New Levels

alayham — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 18:52:58 +0000

Coronavirus: Media and Politicians Take Anti-China Fear Mongering to New Levels alayham Fri, 02/14/2020 - 19:52

Starting in Wuhan in December, the coronavirus outbreak has spread across China, infecting around 64,000 people and worrying the rest of the world. Fueling the panic, media have been printing alarmist scare stories and politicians peddling false information.
One prominent example of this is Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who claimed that the virus was actually developed by the Chinese government. Wuhan, he stated, “has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.” He also claimed that the outbreak is “worse than Chernobyl,” referring to the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Ukraine. “The Wuhan coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China, only Chernobyl was localized. The coronavirus is spreading worldwide,” he said, adding that in one day “confirmed cases increased in China by 30 percent. The true numbers are likely much higher.”
Cotton’s remarks were condemned as unhelpful, at best, and dangerously alarmist fake news, at worse by health authorities. Experts have had to take time off from fighting the virus to debunk his super laboratory conspiracy theories. On the supposed huge increase in cases, Dr. Michael Ryan, the head of the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) health emergencies program, said there was a far more mundane explanation for the change in numbers; “This increase that you’ve all seen in the last 24 hours is largely down to a change in how the cases are being reported,” he told media.
The Chinese government has also expressed its consternation at Cotton’s views. “It’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people. For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing, that it will fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus,” said Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States. “Of course, there are all kinds of speculation and rumors… How can we believe all these crazy things?” he added.

Western media have continually scorned China for its handling of the crisis. The BBC claimed that “Chinese authorities are trying hard to control the narrative” and asked, “can we trust the numbers” from the government. But in reality, the W.H.O. has exalted China as a model of openness and dedication to eradicating the virus, sharing as much genetic and logistical information as possible with partners and organizations. It also managed the Herculean task of building two huge hospitals to house patients in a matter of days. Dr. Ryan stated that he and the W.H.O. Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had, “never seen the scale of the commitment of an epidemic response at this level…The challenge is great but the response has been massive and the Chinese government deserves huge credit,” personally thanking them for their unparalleled effort.
Despite this, the U.S. government has declared itself “disappointed” with China’s supposed defensiveness. “We thought there was better transparency coming out of China, but it doesn’t appear to be,” White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow said.

While #China's dealing with the #coronavirus, some US politicians and mainstream media manipulate things for their own benefit @dancohen3000 pic.twitter.com/RP5GzJ3g7b
— The Alternative World (@TheAltWorld) February 13, 2020

The W.H.O. did make some strong criticisms regarding the outbreak. However, these were reserved for the media, the organization declaring that alongside the medical global emergency, there was also a “massive ‘infodemic’ – an overabundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”
As the virus has spread, so has anti-Chinese racism. In a similar fashion to how Ebola was racialized as an African plague, news of the coronavirus has led to an outbreak of anti-Chinese sentiment across the West, with Chinese restaurants in Europe experiencing decreased business and people of Chinese ancestry all over the world reporting an upsurge in xenophobic and bigoted comments leveled at them. MintPress reported on the phenomenon last month.

Chinese people don't attend rallies, they "descend" upon them
Corrupt Chinese officials don't get convicted for corruption, they "lose power struggles"
China doesn't punish corrupt officials, they "net" them
Chinese media doesn't report news, it reports "propaganda"
— Maitreya Bhakal (@MaitreyaBhakal) February 13, 2020

As of Friday, there have been 64,435 confirmed cases in 25 countries, resulting in 1,383 deaths, all but two in China. This means that only two percent of those who have contracted the virus have died. While certainly a serious cause for concern for health authorities, it pales in comparison to other, more mundane illnesses. For example, the U.S. government estimates that during the winter of 2017-8, over 800,000 Americans were hospitalized with influenza, with 61,000 deaths.
Reminiscent of the coverage of the SARS outbreak in 2003 or 2014 Ebola virus, media and politicians have hyped up the threat levels of a foreign virus for their own ends, creating pandemics of fear and xenophobia to accompany the real but limited medical outbreaks. The coronavirus is serious enough without the pandemic of scaremongering that has come with it.
Feature photo | A person is checked with a thermal imaging camera as precautionary measures against the spreading of novel coronavirus, at Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport in Budapest, Hungary, Feb. 5, 2020. Zoltan Balogh | MTI via AP
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.
The post Coronavirus: Media and Politicians Take Anti-China Fear Mongering to New Levels appeared first on MintPress News.

Link

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-politicians-anti-china-bias-coronavirus-res…

Tags

Source

MintPress