The Second Amendment according to Dick’s CEO Edward Stack (Adapted from “George Washington and Lafayette at Valley Forge,” John Ward Dunsmore, Public Domain)
“Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc., one of the largest retailers of its kind in the United States, is taking new steps to curtail the sale of firearms, including ending sales of assault-style rifles and banning the sale of guns to people younger than 21,” ABC News reported Wednesday.
“We need to do something,” Chairman and CEO Edward Stack told Good Morning America. “And we’re taking these guns out of all of our stores permanently.”
“Something” like what? Side with those who blame and want to ban guns? You’ll notice Stack offers no other “solutions.”
It’s not the first time Dick’s has thrown non-“sporting purposes” gun owners under the bus. They’d abandoned them in time of need after Sandy Hook when they ceased selling “modern sporting rifles” in all but their Field & Stream subsidiaries, and with this new announcement, the self-imposed “ban,” including on “high capacity magazines,” is complete.
But it’s their right, right? They’re not hindering anyone else’s ability to purchase guns of their choice elsewhere. This is just an internal business decision.
Bull. It’s abandoning their brothers-in-arms on the battlefield in a time of dire need and leaving them to stand or fall while the cowardly profiteers who want the benefits of gun owner business without the rigors or risks slink away. It is emboldening the enemy. Their competitors who will not collapse and turn tail, but who hold fast and faithfully and stand with us through the storm, are the ones who earn our continued association.
And today’s decision is already being put to great use by the enemies of the right to keep and bear arms. Look at all the triumphant “news” articles. The anti-gunners (and anti-hunters) are loving it.
Besides, Dick’s has gone beyond just controlling its own business. They’ve joined forces with the gun-grabbers to try and control ours. From the company “media statement”:
At the same time, we implore our elected officials to enact common sense gun reform and pass the following regulations:
Ban assault-style firearms
Raise the minimum age to purchase firearms to 21
Ban high capacity magazines and bump stocks
Require universal background checks that include relevant mental health information and previous interactions with the law
Ensure a complete universal database of those banned from buying firearms
Close the private sale and gun show loophole that waives the necessity of background checks
Dianne Feinstein couldn’t have said it any better. And all backed by force of state arms. Dick’s has allied itself with the gun-grabbers and wannabe totalitarians. It’s joined the Dark Side and become a proud rope-seller.
“We’re staunch supporters of the 2nd Amendment,” Stack blusters, knowing very few watching him kiss DNC/Clinton apparatchik George Stephanopoulos’ ring are likely to see through the lie. “I’m a gun owner myself.”
A “staunch supporter of the Second Amendment” knows why the Framers of the Constitution considered it “necessary to the security of a free State” and also understands the offensive danger of limiting gun ownership to “sporting purposes.” Stack is now actively subverting Founding intent, and doing so to keep those pieces of silver coming in.
That may not work out the way he intends.
“Hunting has trended lower since the 1980s,” an article from last August in The Street titled “Dick’s In the Crosshairs as Gun Sales Continue to Disappoint” noted. Their shares had crashed 23% at the time. Noting gun owner fury when gun writer Jim Zumbo ignorantly badmouthed semi-auto rifles, it will be interesting to see how gun owners react to a hunting and camping equipment retailer out there actively promoting citizen disarmament.
It’s curious that Stack doesn’t stop to think how many now elated with his concessions hate everything he stands for anyway. It’s not gun owners out there seeking to ban hunting, it’s his new “progressive friends,” happy to let him help carry their load and knowing they can always come back for “sport shooters” later. It’s reminiscent of the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who promised a captured Odysseus that he would eat him last as a reward for making wine.
They nonetheless intend to eat self-serving gunkapos.
What remains to be seen is if there will be much remaining to devour, or if gun owners will deny aid and comfort to a newly-revealed enemy of the right to keep and bear arms, and let Dick’s wither to where there’s nothing left to eat. Stack has chosen to go over to the citizen disarmament camp. Let their followers keep Dick’s doors open.
What also remains to be seen is if any gun and ammo makers publicly tell Dick’s they’re no longer interested in being suppliers. You may want to ask some of the companies at that link why they would.
As for Stack and Dick’s:
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!” –Samuel Adams
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Russia has reacted fiercely to the end of week breaking news that President Trump plans to approve the legal sale of US antitank missiles and possibly other advanced systems to the Ukrainian government in a move that could change the battlefield calculus of the war between Ukrainian and Russian-aligned forces in the Donbass region along the Russian border. ABC News described the "total defense package of $47 million includes the sale of 210 anti-tank missiles and 35 launchers" which will be sure to harm Trump"s longtime stated goal of improving relations with Moscow.
Though Kiev has long had limited access to US lethal arms through private contracts with American and international arms producers, this represents a significant escalation involving the likelihood that advanced US systems would be used directly on Russian-aligned militias in the eastern Donbass region and potentially Russian forces along the border. Up until now, the White House has been reluctant to escalate the war so openly, as it did when it supplied anti-Assad fighters in Syria with sophisticated TOW anti-tank missiles.
While the US State Department claims the move is "defensive" in nature, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov charged the US with deliberately "crossing the line" and pushing the Ukrainian authorities "towards new bloodshed," adding that "American weapons can lead to new victims".
Ukrainian army soldiers perform a weapons exercise at a training ground outside Lviv, western Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015. Image source: AP via Common Dreams
"Kiev revanchists are shooting at Donbass every day, they don"t want to conduct peace negotiations and dream of doing away with the disobedient population. And the United States has decided to give them weapons to do that," Ryabkov said. He further slammed the US as an "accomplice in igniting a war" whose political leadership is “blinded by Russophobia and eagerly applaud the Ukrainian nationalist punitive battalions.”
Indeed a number of outspoken Russia hawks in Congress were enthusiastic over the possibility of heavier and direct arms flow to Ukraine, including John McCain, Bob Corker, and Tom Cotton - all supporters of the original Ukraine Freedom Support Act signed into law by President Obama in December 2014, though never fully enacted.
So you"re telling me Putin ordered his puppet Trump to arm Ukrainians that are hostile to Putin?
Cotton for example - recently rumored to be Trump"s pick for CIA Director - said of the new initiative for arms exports to Ukraine: "This is a break from failed Obama era policies to make Russia pay a cost for its aggression. With this decision, the Trump administration is reminding Vladimir Putin and his cronies that they lost the Cold War, and we won’t tolerate their bullying of our friend Ukraine."
But Russian leaders have warned that through the decision the US may be dragged deeper into a quagmire which could result in direct confrontation with pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine"s east. Aleksey Pushkov, member of the Russian Senate security committee, told RT News that delivery of the more advanced systems like the Army"s M-148 Javelin Portable Anti-Tank Missile would require US military advisers on the ground, which could be targeted by separatist forces.
Pushkov told RT, the US “has enough problems already to allow itself to be involved in adventures of the [Ukrainian] regime. And we know too well how adventurous Kiev may be.” This comes as authorities in Kiev are already requesting that Washington adds anti-aircraft missiles to its shopping list as well, according to multiple reports.
Meanwhile German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron issued a statement calling for "disengagement and the withdrawal of heavy weapons" in the Ukrainian conflict, a scenario now much further away from taking shape than ever. But after years of covert American involvement in the Ukrainian proxy and civil war which has raged since 2014 - and which a leaked recording confirmed was precipitated by the US State Department - it appears that hawks like McCain, Cotton, and Corker are finally getting their way.
Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups.
Professor and venerable political observer Walter Russell Mead tweeted on December 8, “I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don’t remember anything like this level of journalistic carelessness back then. The constant stream of ‘bombshells’ that turn into duds is doing much more to damage the media than anything Trump could manage.”
On December 1, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross went on air and made a remarkable claim. For months, the media have been furiously trying to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Ross reported that former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had just pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was prepared to testify that President Trump had instructed him to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election, while Trump was still a candidate. If true, it would have been a gamechanger. But Ross’s claim was inaccurate. Flynn’s documented attempts to contact the Russians came after Trump was president-elect, allegedly trying to lay diplomatic groundwork for the new administration. Ross was suspended by ABC for four weeks without pay for the error.
Later that same weekend, the New York Times ran a story about Trump transition official K. T. McFarland, charging that she had lied to congressional investigators about knowledge of the Trump transition team’s contacts with Russia. The article went through four headline changes and extensive edits after it was first published, substantially softening and backing away from claims made in the original version. The first headline made a definitive claim: “McFarland Contradicted Herself on Russia Contacts, Congressional Testimony Shows.” The headline now reads “Former Aide’s Testimony on Russia Is Questioned.” The website Newsdiffs, which tracks edits of articles after publication, shows nearly the entire body of the article was rewritten. (The Times website makes no mention of the changes.)
Still in that first weekend of December, Senator Orrin Hatch criticized the excesses of federal welfare programs, saying, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves.” The quote was taken wildly out of context. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as well as journalists from Mic, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatch was directly criticizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, with some suggesting Hatch thought children should be put to work to pay for subsidized health care. Not only was Hatch not criticizing the CHIP program, he cowrote the recent bill to extend its funding.
On December 5, Reuters and Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank account records of President Trump and family members, possibly related to business done in Russia. The report was later corrected to say Mueller was subpoenaing “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”
Then on December 8, another Russia bombshell turned into a dud. CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported Donald Trump Jr. had been sent an email on September 4, 2016, with a decryption key to a WikiLeaks trove of hacked emails from Clinton confidant and Democratic operative John Podesta—that is, before the hacked emails were made public. (WikiLeaks is widely surmised to act as a front for Russian intelligence.) MSNBC and CBS quickly claimed to have confirmed CNN’s scoop. Within hours, though, CNN’s report was discredited. The email was sent on September 14, after the hacked Podesta emails had been made publicly available. CNN later admitted it never saw the email it was reporting the contents of.
This is just eight days’ worth of blundering.
Since October of last year, when Franklin Foer at Slate filed an erroneous report on a computer server in Trump Tower communicating with a Russian bank, there have been an unprecedented number of media faceplants, most of them directly related to the Russia-collusion theory.
The errors always run in the same direction—they report or imply that the Trump campaign was in league with Moscow.
For a politicized and overwhelmingly liberal press corps, the wish that this story be true is obviously the father to the errors. Just as obviously, there are precedents for such high-profile embarrassments in the past. (Remember Dan Rather’s “scoop” on George W. Bush’s National Guard service?) But flawed reporting in the Trump era is becoming more the norm than the exception, suggesting the media have become far too willing to abandon some pretty basic journalistic standards.
Editors at top news organizations once treated anonymous sourcing as a necessary evil, a tool to be used sparingly. Now anonymous sources dominate Trump coverage.
It’s not just a problem for readers, who should rightly be skeptical of information someone isn’t willing to vouch for by name. It’s a problem for reporters, too, because anonymous sources are less likely to be cautious and diligent in providing information. According to CNN, the sources behind the busted report on Trump Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks didn’t intend to deceive and had been reliable in the past. Maybe so, but given the network’s repeated errors it’s difficult to just take CNN’s word for it.
But it’s one thing to use anonymous sources; it’s quite another to be entirely trusting of them. CNN decided to report the contents of an email to Donald Trump Jr. based only on the say-so of two anonymous sources and without seeing the emails. “I remember when I was [a staffer] on the Ways and Means committee and I would try and give reporters stories, and I remember the Wall Street Journal demanded to see a document,” former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer tells The Weekly Standard. “They wouldn’t take it from me if I didn’t give them the document, and I thought, ‘Good for them!’ ”
What makes the botched story of the WikiLeaks email more troubling is how quickly MSNBC and CBS ran with CNN’s scoop. “It’s hard to imagine how independent people could repeatedly misread a date on an email and do so for three different networks,” says Fleischer. “Whose eyesight is that bad?”
This points to an additional problem with the sourcing on these unfounded reports. The only way three networks could claim to have verified the same specious story is if they were all relying on the very same sources. Many of the flawed Trump reports appear to be sourced from a very narrow circle of people, who no doubt share partisan motivations or personal animus.
Certainly, it appears a number of recent spurious stories have originated as leaks from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. In Raju and Herb’s report, they revealed that Trump Jr. had been asked about the WikiLeaks email in closed-door testimony before the committee. After CNN’s scoop imploded, a spokesman for Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, issued a classic non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony.
Meanwhile, the Russia investigation has been very good for raising Schiff’s profile. A December 13 press release from the Republican National Committee notes the congressman has at that point spent 20 hours, 44 minutes, and 49 seconds on television since Trump took office, talking mostly about the investigation (pity the low-level staffer who must have had to do the research for that release). During that time, Schiff has always declined to discuss the particulars of the intel committee’s work. Nonetheless, consideration of his sensitive position hasn’t stopped him from offering all manner of innuendo to national TV audiences about evidence suggesting Russia collusion.
For their part, the media don’t seem to be coming to grips with the damage they’re doing to their own credibility. CNN, which calls itself “the most trusted name in news,” didn’t retract their WikiLeaks report but rewrote it in such a way as to render the story meaningless. They also came to the defense of Raju and Herb, saying the reporters acted in accordance with the network’s editorial policies. And of course they didn’t out their sources—the ultimate punishment news organizations can mete out to anonymous tipsters who steer them wrong.
It understandably infuriates the media that President Trump remains unwilling to own up to his own glaring errors and untruths, while news organizations run correction after correction. And it also understandably upsets the media to watch the president actively attack and seek to undermine their work, which remains vital to ensuring accountability in American governance.
What they haven’t grasped is how perversely helpful to him they are being: On a very basic level, President Trump’s repeated salvos against “fake news” have resonance because, well, there does indeed appear to be a lot of fake news.
“There is nothing wrong with holding powerful people accountable. There’s nothing wrong with investigating whether or not collusion took place. But there’s a lot wrong when because you want to believe in the story so much you suspend skepticism,” says Fleischer.
“You let your guard down. You abandon the normal filters that protect journalistic integrity. And you fail to also hold to account powerful leakers, or powerful members of Congress who themselves have an anti-Trump agenda. It’s called putting your thumb on the scale.”
In his annual, multi-hour, Q&A press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin took questions from a hoard of foreign journalists.
Topics spanned from Syria and Ukraine to China"s One-Belt-One-Road, and from Russian general elections to the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, but what most have focused on were his comments on President Trump and the Russiagate debacle...
US based ABC News (of recent infamy for a massive fake news gaffe) asked President Putin about the ongoing ‘Russiagate’ scandal with Donald Trump. The Russian President said the following:
"It’s up to the American people to assess Trump, not me. But look at the markets, they are up, indicating investors trust him. We also respect the US opposition. I don’t know if Trump still has the same desire to cooperate closely with us, but I hope we can work closely on a range of issues.”
Turning to so-called Trump collusion with Russia, Putin said,
“That’s been invented by those aiming to de-legitimize Trump. These people don’t understand they are undermining their own country, they aren’t showing respect for Americans that voted for Trump”.
Finally, turning to contacts between Russian diplomats and Americans, ABC asked "How would you explain the number of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia... and how would you asses the Trump presidency?"
The Russian President replied:
"It is standard practice for diplomats to talk – what’s so strange about this? Why do you have this "Russia spy hysteria"?"
Of course, as the left would exclaim, he would say that wouldn"t he...
Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.
The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.
This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.
It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump/Russia collusion story:
There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.
The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.
How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, Congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s PR Department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:
All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question – one which CNN refuses to address: how did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way, and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?
It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause to be disseminated a blockbuster revelation about Trump/Russia/WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.
Why does this matter so much? For so many significant reasons:
To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).
This tweet is from a member of Congress today. It was RT"d more than 7,000 times (and counting), and liked more than 15,000 times. It"s based on a completely false claim, from a debunked CNN story. This happens over and over. This seems damaging. And still no retraction. https://t.co/fixSRKUxxx
Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “Boom” – which he uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the Russia story – along with a gif of a cannon being detonated:
Incredibly, to this very moment – almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked – Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived – filled with false news and propaganda – by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.
Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy – which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like – would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.
Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email, and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.
Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in US journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this – again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” – as it is Baghdad-Bob-level embarrassing:
Think about what this means. It means that at least two – and possibly more – sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?
Just last week, the Washington Post decided – to great applause (including mine) – to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well established principle of journalism – one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in DC – that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.
The Post made the right call to report off-the-record comments given they were offered with fraudulent intent. This should be done far more often to actually powerful-in-DC people who spread lies while hiding behind anonymity https://t.co/EFLEI4eaq8pic.twitter.com/v6yIJvheT1
Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened – what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” – it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.
If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are – just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody-in-DC, rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.
Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by PR executives and lawyers.
How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?
The more serious you think the Trump/Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this – and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate – that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.
All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.
But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.
No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.
So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment:
It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”
Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.
The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.
Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President Trump’s financial records.
The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.
That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump/Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walk-backed, or retracted – often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:
Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
Crowdstrike finds Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)
That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics – such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow – are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a steady news and entertainment propaganda diet for decades about Russia — actually understand the realities of that country).
U.S. media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.
But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.
But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding behind PR and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.
At minimum, these networks – CNN, MSNBC and CBS – have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information, or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks – the reason those attacks resonate – is themselves and their own conduct.
(Update: hours after this article was published on Saturday – a full day-and-a-half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and a cannon – Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story he hyped has “serious problems”; needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction of re-tweets from his followers as his original tweets hyping the story attracted).
After yesterday"s latest botched hit job by CNN on president Trump, which came exactly one week after the fiasco where erroneous ABC reporting on the Flynn affair sent the market tumbling, it was only a matter of time before Trump lashed out at the news network whose credibility and influence is evaporating with every fabricated story.
A little after 8am on Saturday, he did just that slamming CNN of making a "vicious and intentional mistake" over the network"s effective retraction, when it was forced to correct an erroneous news report related to the Trump/Russia probe. Having been on the receiving end of three "fake news" stories in the past week, betwee the ABC Flynn debacle, the Bloomberg Deutsche Bank subpoena, and now CNN, Trump demanded that CNN fire "those responsible," and commented that an ABC reporter who was suspended for a separate erroneous report should be fired as well.
"Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his “mistake”)," Trump wrote. "Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?" It is worth noting that Ross was not fired but rather suspended for 4 weeks.
In a second tweet, the president suggested CNN change their slogan after the report to "the least trusted name in news."
"CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!" the president tweeted.
Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his “mistake”). Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?
CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!
As reported yesterday, in the original CNN report posted Friday claimed Trump"s eldest son received a "head"s-up" email on Sept. 4, before WikiLeaks had made public a cache of hacked documents containing Democratic information. Other media outlets correctly reported that Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had received the email pointing them to the WikiLeaks documents on Sept. 14, after the documents had already been made public. CNN later corrected its report, issuing the following correction.
CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 -- 10 days earlier -- based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The new details appear to show that the sender was relying on publicly available information. The new information indicates that the communication is less significant than CNN initially reported.
However, despite Trump"s demands a CNN spokesperson said there will not be disciplinary action against the reporter involved, because the reporter used multiple verified sources, following CNN"s editorial process. The most amusing bit, however, was CNN claims that it does not believe there was malicious intent involved.
Update (11:55AM EST): After weeks of speculation, the #MeToo movement has just claimed its latest conquest with Senator Al Franken of Minnesota officially confirming his resignation on the Senate floor.
“Today I am announcing that in the coming weeks I will be resigning as a member of the United States Senate.”
Of course, Franken"s resignation came only after he once again denied the validity of the allegations against him saying "some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others I remember differently."
It"s unclear if Franken recalls this picture "differently"...
* * *
Yesterday, following the "retirement" of John Conyers (D-MI), the chants for Senator Al Franken to follow suit reached a fevered pitch on the suggestion that anything less would simply be racist. The chaos gradually escalated throughout the day with Minnesota Public Radio eventually "confirming" that Franken would resign today...a confirmation that Franken subsequently denied (we covered the chaos here).
Now, The Hill is seemingly once again "confirming" an imminent resignation by reporting that Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton would likely tap Lt. Governor Tina Smith to replace Franken should he choose to resign in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations.
Alas, the back and forth suspense over Franken"s future in the Senate has nearly come to an end as he is set to deliver a speech on the Senate floor at 11:45AM EST.
Senator Franken is scheduled to deliver a speech from the Senate floor at 11:45 AM ET.
For gold investors, the major thorn in our side continues to be the USDJPY so we need to discuss it again.
Over the past weekend at TFMR, we had a discussion about how so many well-intentioned people could have been so wrong about "the metals" over the past five years. It included this sentence: "What we failed to predict was the successful, collective manipulation of nearly all "markets" by the CBs, their primary dealers and their willing/sycophant media through HFT."
That one sentence could be the subject of a full post or podcast but, for now, let"s just focus upon the market manipulation through HFT. As you know by now, the USDJPY is just about the single most important general input for HFT buy/sell decisions. Whether it"s S&P futures, bond futures or Comex Gold, the direction of the USDJPY generally impacts all of these "markets" more than anything else. The chart below plots the inverse of USDJPY (JPYUSD) with gold futures. Note clear correlation that began in 2008.
In observing the central bank market manipulation...when we see the same pattern again and again...and this pattern is followed by the desired equity or bond market reaction...then you know something is up. How many times have we captured screenshots of the BoJ, Fed, SNB or whomever buying the USDJPY in size at just the right moment to create and paint a double bottom on the chart? From there, how many times have we watched a near perfect and uninterrupted, 45-degree angle recovery ensue?
Here are just a couple of egregious examples that I just chose at random from my desktop folder that holds about 40 charts. (I"ve only been keeping them since late summer.)
Well, since we just used the term "egregious", let"s apply it again to the charts below. Recall that things were sailing along surprisingly well last Monday. Over the previous week, the USDJPY had failed to hold support near 113 and again near 112 and it had fallen to near and just below the very-important 111 level. Then, as we chronicled that day, a sudden spike occurred on NO NEWS and not even any rumors. Just a spike from out of the blue that drove the pair immediately back above 111.
And what followed over the next five days? Well, outside of the sudden plunge on the now disproven stories from Brian Ross at ABC News, the USDJPY has followed the same glide path all the way back to 113. Also, IT"S VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE where USDJPY reopened Sunday afternoon...RIGHT ON the glidepath. Remove the reaction to Friday"s unexpected headlines and it"s a near-perfect, 45-degree angle for nearly FIVE FULL DAYS.
(And in case you"re wondering which tail wags which dog, note the turn in USDJPY last Monday clearly preceded the turn in the S&P.)
How is this even possible? It"s not...well, at least not in the traditional and "free market" sense...the pre-2008 and pre-2012 sense. All of these things used to move somewhat independently as human, carbon-based traders made rational investment decisions based upon a number of inputs. However, in 2017, where 90% of all trading is now done through HFT....well, the results are pretty clear. The Central Banks and their Primary Dealer trading desks manipulate the key inputs and HFT does the rest. This is why yours truly and so many other "experts and mavens" have been confounded for the past five years. It"s not nefarious intent and it"s not because gold bugs are cruel, heartless charlatans who are intent upon stealing as many dollars as possible from the easily-duped. Instead, it is a failure to anticipate the levels to which The Central Banks would successfully go to keep their system alive.
Understanding this is why you consistently hear me cite the refrain of PHYSICAL DEMAND. It is only through a renewed crisis of confidence that this system can be broken...at least as it pertains to the precious metals. Physical demand will bust The Bullion Banks by breaking their just-in-time and unallocated delivery system. Physical demand will force price to be discovered through the exchange of physical metal, not the alchemized digital garbage that permeates the system today.
We"ll leave you today with stories from each end of The Bank monster. The first, and one that we"ve been following closely since last March, is the continued run-up to renewed war on The Korean Peninsula. WHILE NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND IS CHEERING THIS ON, it is important to be prepared for all of the unknown unknowns that would come with such a catastrophe, one of them being financial calamity that could again shatter confidence in the current system.
And the other story deals with gold alchemy and the continued shunting of physical demand into sham/scam paper investments. It seems the World Gold Council is hungry to increase their fees. They are apparently planning to offer a whole new "gold" ETF, perhaps designed to compete with the IAU. Ask yourself, from where will this fund get the 200-300 metric tonnes of gold needed to fund its "inventory"? Once again, The Banks will simply perform the alchemy of leveraging current unallocated stockpiles into more and more digital "gold".
Again, true physical demand is the only antidote to the poison created by the Central Bankers and the Bullion Banks. Sadly, 2018 promises another surge in war, debt, negative interest rates and de-dollarization. Will these events finally prompt enough physical demand to break The Banks? Only time will tell.
Questions or comments about this article? Leave your thoughts HERE.
Suspending him had nothing to do with falsifying a report on Trump and Michael Flynn, everything to do with getting caught red-handed, causing a furor at the same time – the network uncomfortable about making news about its fake news reporting.
All Western media operate the same way – disinformation, Big Lies and fake news standard practice on major issues, especially geopolitical ones, notably covering US-dominated NATO imperial wars of aggression, claiming they’re liberating ones, along with anything relating to Trump and Russia.
Ross is ABC’s chief investigative reporter, suspended for four weeks without pay – a meaningless slap on the wrist.
He falsely claimed former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn would testify that candidate Trump directed him to make contact with Russia – his disinformation report typical of how Western media operate, why I call them scoundrels.
They suppress vital news, information, and analysis everyone has a right to know, operating as press agents for wealth, power and privilege, sanitizing their print, on air and online reporting.
What’s not reported is most important of all – why it’s suppressed.
In testimony given special council Robert Mueller’s witch-hunt inquiry, Flynn explained president-elect (not candidate) Trump instructed him to contact Russia, aiming to initiate a process for improving relations.
It was undermined by false accusations of Kremlin interference in America’s electoral process, along with phony claims of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine and nonexistent threats against other countries.
The fabricated Russiagate case hinges on proving illegal or improper Trump team collusion with Moscow during the presidential campaign. Not a shred of evidence suggests it.
Post-election, presidents and administration officials have direct contacts with numerous countries – part of their jobs, the way most nations operate.
ABC News retracted the story when caught red-handed lying. Otherwise, it would have stood as misreported.
Ross is no outlier. All establishment on air and print reporters operate the same way – suppressing hard truths on vital issues, lying to viewers and readers, what they’re instructed to do.
Suspending Ross for four weeks was laughable. He’ll be back in short order to misreport again. If he and others like him diverged from the official narrative, they’d be fired and replaced straightaway.
Western media lack credibility, alternative sources the only reliable ones, especially online, reporting real news, information and analysis – the antidote to media scoundrels’ misreporting.
This weekend may set a new record for number of Trump tweets and retweets. Starting with his congratulations on the Senate"s passage of Tax Reform, Trump has interacted no less than 17 times with his social platform, although things seemed to accelerate following his Saturday noon tweet in which Trump responded to Flynn"s plea agreement in which the president said that "I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!
The odd wording of that tweet - that he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI at the time of his firing - prompted many to speculate that it was prima facie admission of obstruction and interference - something Mueller is tasked with proving - and led to the unprecedented comment by Trump"s personal lawyer, John Dowd, who said he drafted the president"s Saturday morning. Dowd told ABC News he wrote those words and had done so in a "sloppy" manner. A second source familiar with the matter corroborated his account.
The reason for Dowd"s comment is that Trump"s tweet seemed to "add a potentially explosive new dimension" to the ongoing investigation, because as ABC notes, if what Trump, or his lawyer, said is true, why then would Trump ask the FBI director to go easy on Flynn, as former FBI Director James Comey later testified? The message set off renewed talk of potential evidence of obstruction of justice.
As ABC further adds this morning, Dowd"s acknowledgment of involvement in the tweet means it is not clear whether the president did in fact know Flynn had lied to the FBI at the time of firing him -- though one source familiar with the president’s thinking said Trump did not know. Administration officials have declined to comment on that matter, as well.
The unusual clarification by Dowd –-revealing that someone other than Trump himself had authored a tweet from his official account - could also be an attempt to tamp down on potential legal exposure from the message.
The president did not respond to shouted questions Saturday evening about Flynn’s firing as he returned home from campaign fundraisers in New York City.
While we expect Trump"s Saturday tweet to once again shape the news cycle for the next several days, at least until the inevitable and "distracting" war with North Korea finally begins, even as the debate rages what tweets does Trump personally publish and which are drafted by his lawyers, in what appears to have been an attempt to distract from the "confession" fallout, Trump went on a veritable twitter rampage on Saturday night, which has since continued into Sunday morning.
Late on Saturday, Trump launched a new attack on Hillary and the Justice Department over Hillary"s mishandling of emails, writing, "So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday “interrogation” with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?" He then continued: "Many people in our Country are asking what the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed” 33,000 Emails? No justice!"
So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday “interrogation” with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?
Many people in our Country are asking what the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed” 33,000 Emails? No justice!
He then proceeded with the previously discussed slam of ABC News" Brian Ross, congratulating the network for "suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and “papers” should do the same with their Fake News!"
Congratulations to @ABC News for suspending Brian Ross for his horrendously inaccurate and dishonest report on the Russia, Russia, Russia Witch Hunt. More Networks and “papers” should do the same with their Fake News!
And while that concluded the Saturday night tweetstorm, Trump was back this morning and angrier than ever, when he discovered the story about the "tainted" FBI agent, Peter Strzok, who as we reported yesterday, was said to have been "removed" from the Mueller probe (and who previously was tasked with investigating the Clinton email server), after anti-Trump text messages were discovered in his communications to a fellow FBI officer, with whom he had an extramarital affair.
BREAKING: top FBI investigator for Mueller--PETER STRZOK--busted sending political text messages bashing Trump & praising Hillary during the 2016 campaign. STRZOK actually LED the Hillary email probe & recommended clearing her; then was tapped to SUPERVISE the Trump Russia probe!
Wray needs to clean house. Now we know the politicization even worse than McCabe"s ties to McAuliffe/Clinton. It also infected his top investigator PETER STRZOK, who sent texts bashing Trump & praising Hillary during campaign. Strzok led Hillary probe & supervised Trump probe!
In response, Trump then lashed out at the FBI in general, and Comey in particular, with a barrage of of tweets, the most comprehensive of which was "Report: “ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE” Now it all starts to make sense!"
Report: “ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE” Now it all starts to make sense!
preceded by "Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI “agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.” Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge."...
Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI “agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.” Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge.
Ultimately, Trump slammed of both the agency and its former head "After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness."
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters - worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.
And speaking of Comey, it was before 6 am when Trump, seeming concerned about the implications of the Dowd tweet snafu, tweeted "I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!"
I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!
The BBC"s Paul Danager perhaps summarized the ongoing fracture in the realtionship between Trump and the FBI: "Not since Nixon has a US President been this at war with the FBI. It’s destructive for both arms of government."
Not since Nixon has a US President been this at war with the FBI. It’s destructive for both arms of government. https://t.co/Jkz6DeWsw4
It still remains to be seen who will win this war.
Trump wasn"t done, however, and shortly after his last tweet on the FBI, he shifted attention to last week"s "Kate"s Law" ruling in San Francisco, tweeting "Such a total miscarriage of Justice in San Francisco!"...
... before reverting once again to the ABC reporting snafu, urging "People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars!"
People who lost money when the Stock Market went down 350 points based on the False and Dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of @ABC News (he has been suspended), should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused - many millions of dollars!
And since Gen. Kelly has clearly given up any hope of controlling Trump"s twitter account, we can only expect more, perhaps self-destructive, tweets to come out as Trump"s tweetstorm appears to be nowhere near over.
In just 24 hours, multiple false media reports caused financial stocks to crash, and led to an airstrike that could have provoked an international war.
In just 24 hours, multiple false media reports caused financial stocks to crash, and led to an airstrike that could have provoked an international war.