Fake Rape Story By White Wing Gets Blown Up…Again

Back in the bad old days, it wasn’t uncommon for a white woman to shout rape against a black man (or men) to cover up some personal travesty.

Usually resulting in said black men getting lynched for a crime they didn’t commit.

Seems like old times…

And in response to a certain board troll…Notice how the name “Daily Caller” comes up in the story.

A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation.

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.

“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.

In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.

The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.

A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.

The Post positioned video reporters outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office.

After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

Phillips’s arrival at the Project Veritas office capped a weeks-long effort that began only hours after The Post published an article on Nov. 9 that included allegations that Moore once initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old named Leigh Corfman.

Post reporter Beth Reinhard, who co-wrote the article about Corfman, received a cryptic email early the next morning.

“Roy Moore in Alabama . . . I might know something but I need to keep myself safe. How do we do this?” the apparent tipster wrote under an account with the name “Lindsay James.”

The email’s subject line was “Roy Moore in AL.” The sender’s email address included “rolltide,” the rallying cry of the University of Alabama’s sports teams, which are nicknamed the Crimson Tide.

Reinhard sent an email asking if the person was willing to talk off the record.

“Not sure if I trust the phone,” came the reply. “Can we just stick to email?”

“I need to be confident that you can protect me before I will tell all,” the person wrote in a subsequent email. “I have stuff I’ve been hiding for a long time but maybe it should stay that way.”

The tipster’s email came amid counterattacks by Moore supporters aimed at The Post and its reporters.

That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted.

The Post, like many other news organizations, has a strict policy against paying people for information and did not do so in its coverage of Moore.

On Nov. 14, a pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail from a man falsely claiming to be a Post reporter and seeking women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Moore for money. No one associated with The Post made any such call.

In the days that followed the purported tipster’s initial emails, Reinhard communicated with the woman through an encrypted text messaging service and spoke by phone with the person to set up a meeting. When the woman suggested a meeting in New York, Reinhard told her she would have to know more about her story and her background. The woman offered that her real name was Jaime Phillips.

Phillips said she lived in New York but would be in the Washington area during Thanksgiving week and suggested meeting Tuesday at a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Va. “I’m planning to do some shopping there so I’ll find a good place to meet before you get there,” Phillips wrote in a message sent via Signal, the encrypted messaging service.

When Reinhard suggested bringing another reporter, Phillips wrote, “I’m not really comfortable with anyone else being there this time.”

Reinhard arrived to find Phillips, wearing a brown leather jacket and with long red hair, already seated in a booth in the restaurant.

The 41-year-old said she had been abused as a child, Reinhard said. Her family had moved often. She said she moved in with an aunt in the Talladega area of Alabama and started attending a church youth group when she met Moore in 1992, the year he became a county judge. She said she was 15. She said they started a “secret” sexual relationship.

“I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t care,” she said.

She said that she got pregnant, that Moore talked her into an abortion and that he drove her to Mississippi to get it.

In the interview, she told Reinhard that she was so upset she couldn’t finish her salad….More, including the Post hammering this woman’s boss, James O’Keefe…

 

 

John Kelly Lied in Comments About Frederica Wilson

And here’s the tape –

Frederica Wilson not only did not credit herself for the funding of the FBI Building in Florida as Kelly stated, she claimed to have fast tracked the naming of the Building, thanked then Republican Speaker Boehner, and Marco Rubio for getting the building named for two FBI Agents killed in action, in record time at the behest of the FBI.

Worse  – when spent the second half of her speech, prising the fallen FBI Agents and the FBI and Law Enforcement for protecting the community.

The General’s “barrel” isn’t empty…

It’s full of shit.

Here is her whole speech –

 

Add to the List of Chumph’s Cadre Busted – Steve Bannon and “Seinfield”

Apparently the whole Steve Bannon – “Making millions from Seinfeld TV Show” schtick was a lie as well.

Bannon gets busted…Again.

BUSTED: There are no records of Steve Bannon making money off ‘Seinfeld’ and yadda yadda yadda

A key part of the mythos surrounding embattled White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon is that he makes millions of dollar in royalties from a savvy investment that included profit participation in the sitcom “Seinfeld,” but a New Yorker article about Bannon’s years in Hollywood is now casting doubt on that claim.

In an essay titled, “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon,” journalist Connie Bruck dissects a number of Bannon’s key claims about his time in the movie industry and finds that most of them — including the “Seinfeld” story — don’t really hold up under scrutiny.

“Last November, when Bannon was named Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist, many articles highlighted an extraordinary fact about his Hollywood career: that he had negotiated a profit participation in ‘Seinfeld’ in 1993, two years before the show went into syndication,” said Bruck. “Forbes reported that, if Bannon had a one-per-cent share in the profits, ‘he would have made about $32.6 million since 1998,’ and went on to say that ‘Bannon’s steady “Seinfeld” income’ was supporting his career as a conservative propagandist.”

The factoid first surfaced in a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek profile of Bannon. According to Bannon, Westinghouse Electric hired his firm to sell the corporation’s small share in an entertainment company called Castle Rock.

Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner was interested in buying all of Castle Rock including minority shareholders. Bannon said he advised Westinghouse to take the offer. The company’s representatives reportedly told Bannon that if the deal was so great, he should put up some of his own cash for the properties in the Castle Rock portfolio. One of them was “Seinfeld.”

“Some of those who were responsible for ‘Seinfeld’ became agitated by Bannon’s story,” wrote Bruck. “Larry David, the show’s head writer and executive producer, told me, ‘I don’t think I ever heard of him until he surfaced with the Trump campaign and I had no idea that he was profiting from the work of industrious Jews!’”

However, when Bruck scrutinized the deal — which Bannon and Co. reportedly came away from with a small portion of Castle Rock’s TV package — and followed it through a series of acquisitions and mergers until she found that after 1995, Warner Bros. acquired “Seinfeld” and began to send out regular profit participation statements.

“The Castle Rock and the Westinghouse records from the early months of syndication are not readily available,” wrote Brock. “It is possible that Bannon’s deal was capped and paid out at that time. But, since then, neither CBS nor Castle Rock nor Warner Bros. has records of payments to Bannon, if those records are as they were described to me.”

Got a little Blue Eyed Soul just for Steve…Not sure how the dancing girl in a skimpy bikini made it past the TV censors in 1965, but here goes.

 

Latest Allegation by Putin’s Bitch Blows Up

Putin’s Bitch is reaching for any straw in a hurricane, with his latest feeble attempt to blame former National Security Adviser Susan Rice with somehow “wiretapping” him by issuing a legal order to unmask the identity of his cabal colluding with Russia…

 

Putin’s Bitch Lies Exposed in Hearing

Today was a bad one for the serial liar in chief.

Not only did he lie about supposed wiretaps by President Obama, as part of an ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the election, he and his staff are under investigation for collusion (treason) with the Russians.

FBI Director Comey: Justice Dept. has no information that supports Trump’s tweets alleging he was wiretapped by Obama

■ The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, publicly confirmed an investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election and whether associates of the president were in contact with Moscow.

■ Mr. Comey also said the F.B.I. had “no information” to support President Trump’s allegation that Barack Obama wiretapped him.

■ The hearing’s featured witnesses: Mr. Comey and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency.

Comey confirms F.B.I. investigation into Russian election interference

The F.B.I. is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — and whether there was any coordination, Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Comey said that it was unusual for the F.B.I. to confirm or deny the existence of any investigations, but that in unusual circumstances when it is in the public interest, the bureau will sometimes discuss such matters.

“This is one of those circumstances,” he said.

“The F.B.I., as part of our counterintelligence effort, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 president election,” he continued, adding that the investigation included looking at whether associates of Mr. Trump were in contact with Russian officials, and whether they colluded with them.

Admiral Rogers made it clear that Russian efforts to interfere in democratic elections were not a one-off intrusion. They continue — now in Europe.

“We’ve seen some of the same things we’ve seen in the U.S. in terms of disinformation, fakes news,” he said.

President Trump, offering commentary on Twitter, put the best spin on it, noting that the witnesses did not say Russian hackers had changed vote tallies.

The vote tallies thing is a sensitive issue for several reasons. Investigating the vote tallies would expose the hacking of voting machines in certain states, which was possibly done by the Republican Party, and may have been done with technical and other assistance by the Russians.  There is a lot more dirt here having to do with actions by certain Republican elected officials, who may also have colluded with the Russians, or been beneficiaries of Russian spying on their Democrat opponents. There is already substantial credible public evidence to this effect. This politically wold be akin to tossing a thermite bomb into a natural gas tank farm, as it would potentially lay open a number of illegal acts, including treason within the Republican Party.

F.B.I. director says there’s ‘no information’ to support Trump wiretapping charge

Mr. Comey told the House Intelligence Committee, “We have no information to support” President Trump’s assertion on Twitter that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.

“We have no information to support those tweets,” Mr. Comey said, repeating moments later, “All I can tell you is that we have no information that supports them.”

The N.S.A. chief, Admiral Rogers, weighed in as well, saying that he had no knowledge of anyone asking the British or any other ally to wiretap Mr. Trump. That seemed to refute another claim made by the White House.

“I’ve seen nothing on the N.S.A. side that we engaged in such activity, nor that anyone engaged in such activity,” Admiral Rogers said.

He then explicitly denied having any indication that Mr. Trump was wiretapped by British intelligence at the request of Mr. Obama….More Here...

 

Republican Racism on Full Display

One of the thing promoted by white supremacists which has become a core part of the Republican belief set is Reverse Racism. That somehow white folks are the ones being discriminated against.  Like everything else these folks believe  – it is a lie. In this case a racist lie as there is no statistical information whatsoever supporting this.

In this Bill Maher segment, conservative racist bimbo Tomi Lahren gets her ass handed to her…By a fellow conservative as well as Michael Dyson.

‘F*cking crazy’: Rick Wilson slams Tomi Lahren for claim whites are discriminated as much as blacks

Conservative Tomi Lahren was flattened Friday night going up against Bill Maher’s panel of political experts.

Lahren claimed that it wouldn’t matter to her if Donald Trump was black, had three wives and grabbed women like Trump claimed he did. Michael Eric Dyson said that in the hypothetical scenario with “black Trump,” it wouldn’t matter because he would be in jail.

Also see: Maher guest Tomi Lahren struggles to defend Trump’s hypocrisy and ‘bullsh*t tornado’ of promises

Maher read off a statistic that 32 percent of Americans think that discrimination against whites is as bad as discrimination against blacks. Lahren tried to pivot to talking about UC Berkeley’s protests but Maher asked her the question again. She confessed that she does think that it is as bad.

“Since I’m a conservative and not a Trump person, let me say this,” Wilson began. “That’s absurd. That’s f*cking crazy”

Lahren also defended Congress for rescinding President Barack Obama’s executive order making it illegal to dump pollutants in waterways because it means coal miners can have jobs again.

“Why do they have to cling to the worst jobs ever?” Maher asked her. Lahren said that it was all they know, but Maher asked why they couldn’t retrain coal miners and give them jobs that won’t kill them.

“He doesn’t know any coal miners!” former senate candidate Jason Kander cut in. “He knows CEOs of coal companies!”

She argued that Trump knows them because they voted for him en masse. But Kander said Trump doesn’t actually “know” them.

“There’s a kind of hazy nostalgia with Trump’s plan, ‘We’re going to have ironworks and shipyards and coal miners,’” Rick Wilson said. “These are things — we might as well get our buggy-whip industry back together again. It’s this retrospective, fake past that doesn’t exist anymore. And, God bless them, they work their asses off, and you know what, natural gas took their jobs, not Barack Obama.”

 

Republican Admits Conservative Lie…”It Never Trickles Down”

One of the Articles of Faith in the Republican party and of conservatives since Raygun is “Trickle Down Economics”. The idea that making the rich richer, means they in turn will create jobs. In a country where small business creates 3/5ths of all new jobs – it really should have been apparent 30 years ago that this was a scam.

Joe Scarborough finally lets the cat out of the bag…

Now all we need is for the paid Faux News harlots to come clean.

Joe Scarborough gives up the game: After 30 years, the GOP base realized ‘it never trickles down’

 

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough complained on Tuesday that the Republican Party was fracturing because it had advocated economic policies benefiting the richest Americans for the last 30 years with the promise that the wealth would “trickle down” to others — but it never did.

“The problem with the Republican Party over the past 30 years is they haven’t — and I’ll say, we haven’t — developed a message that appeals to the working class Americans economically in a way that Donald Trump’s does,” the former Republican lawmaker explained. “We talk about cutting capital gains taxes that the 10,000 people that in the crowd cheering for Donald Trump, they are never going to get a capital gains cut because it doesn’t apply.”

“We talk about getting rid of the death tax,” he continued. “The death tax is not going to impact the 10,000 people in the crowd for Donald Trump. We talk about how great free trade deals are. Those free trade deals never trickle down to those 10,000 people in Donald Trump’s rallies.”

“You sound like Bernie Sanders,” NBC’s Chuck Todd pointed out.

“But herein lies the problem with the Republican Party,” Scarborough complained. “It never trickles down! Those people in Trump’s crowds, those are all the ones that lost the jobs when they get moved to Mexico and elsewhere. The Republican donor class are the ones that got rich off of it because their capital moved overseas and they made higher profits.”

GOP strategist Nicole Wallace griped that Republicans “let Democrats paint our side as being on the side of Wall Street.”

According to Scarborough, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was losing because he still believed in conservatism as it was “defined by the donor class, as defined by the wealthiest Republicans.”

“The Republicans said, listen, we’re going to have all of these trade deals and tax cuts that benefit our wealthiest donor class, but we’ll give them the social issues,” Scarborough said of the last 30 years. “We’ll give them abortion, we’ll give them gay marriage, we’ll give them guns and they’ll vote for us.”

“What we’re finding this year is, they’ll even support a guy who says Planned Parenthood is good if he comes with an economic approach that they feels that could actually help them more in the future.”

 

Poor in America Worse Off Than Some Poor in 3rd World Nations

Yeah…That is a shocking assertion. Unfortunately it is true. And while Donald Trump and the rest of the right jump around like syncopated baboons, the truth of the matter is that America’s decline started just about the moment Raygun took office, and modern conservatism gained political majority in the state and federal legislatures.

And unless there are some very fundamental changes in the sort of people who get elected in this country it is just going to get worse. And that needs to be a bipartisan change.

I mean as a recent example of the failure of conservatism, HTF do we get lead contaminated water killing and maiming the children of Flint, Michigan? I mean access to clean water is one of the measurements we use to gauge the progress of Third World countries. And we let a morally bankrupt political system based on the blathering of a neo-nazi sympathizer drive our state governments? Atlas “Shrugged” right after he took a shit all over you.

 

We’re No. 16! Why Donald Trump’s boorish American exceptionalism is so wrong

Here’s how we need to make America great again. In most every metric that counts, we are slipping against the world

As a resident of white suburban America, I grew up believing that, as Fox News host Sean Hannity once so eloquently put it, “The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.” This article of faith in the superiority of the U.S. was instilled deep within my brain as a child, right next to the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin and then visited by three Wise Men. But as I began to travel the world a few years ago — a globetrotting adventure that took me through Europe and Canada and inspired me to start a journal of international rankings of countries according to various metrics — it became increasingly clear that American exceptionalism is a baseless mythology of tribalistic self-aggrandizement perpetuated by people who (if I may generalize a bit) can’t locate Denmark on a map.

As it happens, the champions of this unique brand of nationalism are largely concentrated on the political right, where one also finds the attitude of anti-intellectualism in toxic doses. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The fact is that when one looks at infrastructure, life expectancy, family paid leave, health care, social mobility, income inequality, political corruption, government efficiency, economic stability, childhood poverty, student debt, water quality, education, prosperity, happiness and even Internet speed, one finds the U.S. absent from the top 10 “best countries” in every single instance. While the U.S. continues to have the largest economy in the world and by far the biggest military budget, in most categories relating to prosperity, security, happiness and well-being, the great American empire falls somewhere between the developed and the developing world.

But don’t take my word for it. As the ancient philosopher Plato once observed, beliefs without justification aren’t knowledge, and justification requires evidence. So, let’s take a gander at some statistics from various sources, beginning with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a Swiss not-for-profit foundation that’s “independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests.” According to the WEF, the U.S. fares as follows relative to the rest of the world: 16th in quality of overall infrastructure, 22nd with respect to competition, 33rd in terms of public institutions, 34th in terms of ethics and corruption, 35th in terms of health, 58th in terms of primary education, 67th in terms of security and 73rd in terms of wasteful government spending.

In terms of the WEF’s overall “global competitiveness index,” Switzerland comes in first with a value of 5.7 (out of 7), followed by Singapore with 5.6, and then the U.S., Finland, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands all tied with 5.5. So, not terrible overall — yet conservatives would cringe at the thought that we’re tied with multiple “socialist” countries for third place. As it happens, though, the U.S. is far behind such countries according to other international rankings. Forbes, for example, ranks the U.S. as the 22nd best place for business in the world, with countries like Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Finland above us. Eventhe Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom leaves the U.S. out of the top 10, placing Hong Kong, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Denmark at the top.

In terms of “prosperity,” a concept that includes factors like governance, education, health, personal freedom and the economy, the London-based Legatum Instituteranks the U.S. 11th, with Norway, Switzerland, Canada and Sweden being the most prosperous. We’re also ranked 13th in the world with respect to social mobility, or the freedom for underprivileged individuals to climb the social ladder and become successful. The result is that, as Politifact confirmed in a “Mostly True” rating from 2013, it’s actually “easier to obtain the American dream in Europe” than it is in the U.S. Take a moment to let that sink in. According to the research that Politifact cites, “Of the 10 countries studied, the United States had the strongest link between parents’ education and a child’s economic, educational and socio-emotional outcomes … more pronounced than in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Nordic countries, as well as Canada and Australia.”

Social mobility is important in part because studies show that “a lack of wealth does make poor people sadder,” and social immobility prevents those without wealth from acquiring it. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the U.S. isn’t among the top 10 happiest countries. According to the most recent data, we’re the 15th happiest country in the world, behind Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and our gentle neighbor to the north, Canada. Another factor relevant to happiness concerns the overall empowerment of women, who constitute 50.8 percent of the U.S. population. As the Global Gender Gap Index reports, countries like Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark score the best, while the U.S. ranks a shameful 20th. Yet another happiness factor relates to the prevalence of childhood poverty. Here the U.S. ranks 34th out of 35 countries considered by a recent study. Sadly, this is consistent with a 2014 report from Johns Hopkins that found that “teenagers in Baltimore face poorer health and more negative outlooks than those in urban centers of Nigeria, India and China.” Other studies have revealed that rates of PTSD among inner-city residents in America are “as high or higher than [rates among] Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam veterans.”

There’s also evidence to suggest that people “are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller.” In other words, if a country is rich but all its wealth is concentrated among a small class of elite billionaires, society as a whole might be miserable. So, how does the U.S. fare in this respect? To quote a Pew Research Center article on the issue, “the U.S. has one of the most unequal income distributions in the developed world … even after taxes and social-welfare policies are taken into account.” In fact, of the 10 richest people in the world, eight are American. And the situation of inequality is only getter worse globally: just six years ago, the 388 most affluent people owned the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent. Today, Oxfam reports that “The world’s 62 richest billionaires have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population.” Yes, you read that correctly: 62.

The U.S. also ranks 43rd in the world for life expectancy, 37th with respect to health care, 20th in terms of political stability and 26th with respect to cleanliness, according to the Environmental Performance Index, maintained by researchers at Yale and Columbia University. And while we’re often an early adopter of new technology, we rank 22nd with respect to our Internet speed. Regarding our moral behavior in the world, the Global Peace Index, which ranks 162 counties according to their “national peacefulness,” places the U.S. in 94th place — closer to the bottom of the list than the top. (In fact, a 2014 global survey found that the world as a whole sees the U.S. asthe number one threat to world peace.) Furthermore, unlike many other countries in the developed (and developing) world, college education isn’t free for Americans, we don’t have a universal health care system, and we’re the only “major country” in the world that fails to provide family paid leave, as Bernie Sanders is fond of pointing out. Even our tap water isn’t among the safest in the developed world, nor do we have any of the best airports.

The point is that, as should be clear by now, there’s an unequivocal pattern of American inferiority when our country’s performance is juxtaposed with the rest of the developed world’s. Indeed, in many categories — such as childhood poverty, income inequality and family paid leave — we’re just barely a developed country, if even that. The result of these failures is that our collective quality of life is not nearly as high as it ought to be. Here it’s worth turning to the Mercer Quality of Life Survey, since it attempts to quantify the livability of some 221 cities around the world. And guess what it finds? The U.S. has only a single city in the top 30 — and it happens to be the ultra-progressive den of liberal debauchery called San Francisco. At the pinnacle of Mercer’s list are cities like Vienna, Zurich, Auckland, Munich and Vancouver. In fact, of all the cities in the North American continent, the top four are all in Canada. Now that’s just embarrassing, eh?…Read The Rest Here…

 

Uncle Ben Carson Story Falls Apart

Whoops! The ever changing story about Uncle Ben’s past…

Ben Carson’s Stabbing Story Is Full of Holes

In one version of the story, Carson attempts to stab a bully with a large camping knife he had been holding. In another, he pulls a pocketknife on his friend while listening to classical music at the friend’s house. So which is it?

Ben Carson, now surging to a national lead in the polls for the Republican nomination for president, has repeatedly told the story of one of his darkest moments: the time he attempted to stab a classmate in a fit of rage.

He referenced the incident most recently in response to Donald Trump’s accusation that Carson is “low-energy.”

“There was a time when I was, you know, very volatile,” Carson said. “But, you know, I changed.”

The story, as he told it this past week, goes something like this: Carson was 14 years old. He and his friend were arguing over radio stations. The disagreement escalated, Carson tried to stab him, and the blade ended up hitting his friend’s belt buckle—causing the knife to break and saving Carson and his victim from harm.

But the circumstances surrounding the failed stabbing have shifted in the 20 years since Carson began telling it.

The first time Carson shared this story was nearly two decades ago in his two books released in 1996. In the lesser known of the two, Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence, Carson describes the tale as a seminal moment in his process of growing up.

“One other factor played an important role in my development. I had always had a terrible temper, striking out at anyone who opposed me. One afternoon when I was fourteen, I argued with a friend named Bob. Pulling out a camping knife, I lunged at my friend. The steel blade struck his metal belt buckle and snapped,” he wrote.

In Gifted Hands, the autobiography that thrust Carson into celebrity status, and spawned a miraculously awful made-for-television movie with the star of Snow Dogs, the story is much more detailed.

“I was in the ninth grade when the unthinkable happened. I lost control and tried to knife a friend. Bob and I were listening to a transistor radio when he flipped the dial to another station. [Note: In the film version of Gifted Hands, ‘Bob’ is annoyed that classical music is playing. A young Ben Carson is whittling at a table outside of school.]

‘You call that music?’ he demanded.

‘It’s better than what you like!’ I yelled back, grabbing for the dial.

‘Come on, Carson. You always—’

In that instant blind anger—pathological anger—took possession of me. Grabbing the camping knife I carried in my back pocket, I snapped it open and lunged for the boy who had been my friend. With all the power of my young muscles, I thrust the knife toward his belly. The knife hit the big, heavy ROTC buckle with such force that the blade snapped and dropped to the ground. I stared at the broken blade and went weak. I had almost killed him. I had almost killed my friend.”

Carson concludes the anecdote by saying he told Bob he was sorry and then ran home, locked himself in the bathroom, contemplated his actions, and found God in part due to the incident.

Fast forward to Carson’s 2000 autobiography The Big Picture. In one chapter, Carson discusses a speech he gave in Baltimore to a “restless standing-room-only audience,” in which he once again told the saga of his knife attack.

“I told how I had gotten so angry one day that I lunged at a friend with a knife. I aimed at his stomach, but I hit his belt buckle instead. Rather than slicing open my friend’s abdomen, the blade broke off, and my friend ran away terrified but otherwise unhurt. Afterward, I was almost as frightened as my friend by the realization of what had almost happened. I could have very well ended up in jail instead of Yale. Instead, God used that incident to help turn my life around.”

In this retelling, it’s the friend who runs away instead of Carson.

The story comes up once again in Carson’s 2007 book Take the Risk, in which details return.

“One day, as a fourteen-year-old in ninth grade, I was hanging out at the house of my friend Bob, listening to his radio, when he suddenly leaned over and dialed the tuner to another station. I’d been enjoying the song playing on the first station, so I reached over and flipped it back. Bob switched stations again. Then something snapped inside of me. A wave of rage welled up, and almost without thinking, I pulled out the pocketknife I always carried. In what seemed like one continuous, involuntary motion, I flicked open the blade and lunged viciously, right at my friend’s stomach. Incredibly, the point of the knife struck Bob’s large metal belt buckle and the blade snapped off in my hands.”

In this instance, Carson is at Bob’s house. And the weapon, in this case, is also referred to as a “pocketknife” instead of a “camping knife”—which, this time, he pulls out of his pocket. In other iterations of the story, Carson already had the knife in his hand before the attack. In the film adaptation of Gifted Hands, for example, Carson is seen whittling a stick with a large hunting knife and playing classical music on the radio, which incites the other boy’s anger.

Perhaps the biggest departure from the original version of the story comes in 2011’s America the Beautiful, in which the situation is described much more as a random encounter.

“Because of the racial and socioeconomic injustice I experienced as a boy, in my anger and frustration I began to retaliate by going after people with baseball bats, rocks, and knives. One day a boy pushed me too far. I told him to back off, but he wouldn’t quit pestering me. Finally, I pulled out my knife and lunged at him, striking him in the abdomen. He fell back, and for a moment I thought I had killed him, but just then my knife blade fell to the ground. It had hit his belt buckle and snapped in two.”

In all retellings of this story, Carson gets angry, pulls out a knife, and the knife hits a belt buckle, saving his tormenter from harm. But, recently, pivotal parts of the story became very different.

In 2014, Carson released One Nation, and the story becomes less specific.

“I had been minding my own business when a classmate came along and began to ridicule me. I had a large camping knife in my hand and, without thinking, I lunged at him, plunging the knife into his abdomen. He backed off, certain that he had been mortally wounded before discovering that the knife blade had struck a large metal belt buckle under his clothing and broken. He fled in terror but I was even more terrified when realizing that I had almost killed someone. That incident led me to prayerfully consider my plight and to ask for God’s guidance and help. I came to understand that very day that I was always angry because I was selfish.”

In this iteration, both the encounter and his alleged bully are random, the knife—now not a pocketknife but a “large camping knife”—is already in his hand, the location is unclear, and it is now Carson’s victim—and not Carson, himself—who runs away.

Carson has released three books since then—One Vote in 2014, What I Believe, earlier this year and A More Perfect Union, for which he is currently on tour. There is no mention of the story in any context in those works.

Carson has been retelling the story in recent weeks to illustrate a moment of unbridled fury that led him to find his faith. He says it is, in part, the moment that transformed him from troubled teen to medical wunderkind—and turned him into the man of God he is today…

 

Uncle Ben Carson – “A Real Black President”…And a Popeyes Holdup

The robber didn’t know who he was robbing?

 

What Happened to That American Exceptionalism? There is None Anymore…

America has been on the decline since Raygun – despite on small moment of high achievement and expectations during the Clinton Administration.

The lang fall into mediocrity in America can be traced directly to the steps of the conservatives in America. Al most every country which is superior to the US in any category has a government and social system which conservatives would call “socialism”. Quite frankly – socialism is kicking our ass.

I am going to start with parts of an article in Fortune Magazine… 12 signs America is on the decline.

1. Median household income

Rank of U.S.: 27th out of 27 high-income countries

Americans may feel like global leaders, but Spain, Cyprus and Qatar all have higher median household incomes than America’s (about $54,000). So does much of Europe and the industrialized world. Per capita median income in the US ($18,700) is also relatively low–and unchanged since 2000. A middle-class Canadian’s income is now higher.

2. Education and skills

Rank of U.S.: 16th out of 23 countries

The US ranked near the bottom in a skills survey by theOrganization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which examined European and other developed nations. In its Skills Outlook 2013, the US placed 16th in adult literacy, 21st in adult numeracy out of 23, and 14th in problem-solving. Spots in prestigious US universities are highly sought-after. Yet higher education, once an effective way out of poverty in the US, isn’t anymore – at least not for lower-income and minority students. The authors quote studies showing, for example, that today 80% of white college students attend Barron’s Top 500 schools, while 75% of black and Latino students go to two-year junior colleges or open-admissions (not Top 500) schools. Poor students are also far less likely to complete a degree.

3. Internet speed and access

Rank of U.S.: 16th out of 34 countries

Broadband access has become essential for industry to grow and flourish. Yet in the US, penetration is low andspeed relatively slow versus wealthy nations—thought thecost of internet is among the highest ($0.04 per megabit per second in Japan, for example, versus $0.53 in the US). The problem may be too much concentration and too little competition in the industry, the authors suggest.

4. Health

Rank of U.S.: 33rd out of 145 countries

When it comes to its citizens’ health, in countries that are home to at least one million people, the US ranks below many other wealthy countries. More American women also are dying during pregnancy and childbirth, the authors note, quoting a Lancet study. For every 100,000 births in the United States, 18.5 women die. Saudi Arabia and Canada have half that maternal death rate.

5. People living below the poverty line

Rank of U.S.: 36th out of 162 countries, behind Morocco and Albania

Officially, 14.5% of Americans are impoverished — 45.3 million people–according to the latest US Census data.That’s a larger fraction of the population in poverty than Morocco and Albania (though how nations define poverty varies considerably). The elderly have Social Security, with its automatic cost-of-living adjustments, to thank, the authors say, for doing better: Few seniors (one in 10) are poor today versus 50 years ago (when it was one in three). Poverty is also down among African Americans. Now America’s poor are more often in their prime working years, or in households headed by single mothers.

6. Children in poverty

Rank of U.S.: 34th out of 35 countries surveyed

When UNICEF relative poverty – relative to the average in each society—the US ranked at the bottom, above only Romania, even as Americans are, on average, six times richer than Romanians. Children in all of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan fare better.

7. Income inequality

Rank of U.S.: Fourth highest inequality in the world.

The authors argue that the most severe inequality can be found in Chile, Mexico, Turkey — and the US. Citing the Gini coefficient, a common inequality metric, and data from Wall Street Journal/Mercer Human Resource Consulting, they say this inequality slows economic growth, impedes youths’ opportunities, and ultimately threatens the nation’s future (an OECD video explains). Worsening income inequality is also evident in the ratio of averageCEO earnings to average workers’ pay. That ratio went from 24:1 in 1965 to 262:1 in 2005.

8. Prison population

Rank of U.S.: First out of 224 countries

More than 2.2 million Americans are in jail. Only China comes close, the authors write, with about 1.66 million.

9. Life satisfaction

Rank of U.S.: 17th out of 36 countries

The authors note Americans’ happiness score is only middling, according to the OECD Better Life Index. (The index measures how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings.) People in New Zealand, Finland, and Israel rate higher in life satisfaction. A UN report had a similar finding.

10. Corruption

Rank of U.S.: 17th out of 175 countries.

Barbados and Luxembourg are ahead of the US when it comes to citizens’ perceptions of corruption. Americans view their country as “somewhat corrupt,” the authors note, according to Transparency International, a Berlin-based nonprofit. In a separate survey of American citizens, many said politicians don’t serve the majority’s interest, but are biased toward corporate lobbyists and the super-rich. “Special interest groups are gradually transforming the United States into an oligarchy,” the authors argue, “concerned only about the needs of the wealthy.”

11. Stability

Rank of U.S.: 20th out of 178 countries.

The Fragile States Index considers factors such as inequality, corruption, and factionalism. The US lags behind Portugal, Slovenia and Iceland.

12. Social progress index

Rank of U.S.: 16th out of 133 countries

A broad measure of social well-being, the index comprises 52 economic indicators such as access to clean water and air, access to advanced education, access to basic knowledge, and safety. Countries surpassing the US include Ireland, the UK, Iceland, and Canada.

“If America’s going to be great again, we’ve got to start fixing things,” Friedman said.

Just for the heck of it, I am going to add a couple more…

Economic Mobility

“If you work hard you can achieve”…A poor kid has a better chance of achieving reaching the higher economic levels in other countries. The US lag is getting worse.

The following chart only compares the 27 industrialized countries. The US actually drops to 17th if you include Second World Countries.

Infant Mortality

Your baby has a 2.5 times greater chance of dying prenatal, or postnatal covering the first year of life than in Japan or Finland. For black mothers that is about 4 times greater.

The US ranks 27th of the 27 Industrialized Nations… Comparing it to all nations we are about 40th behind Cuba.

Suicide Rate

America is in the middle of the pack. However the rate of suicides in the US exceeds that of Libya, the Central African Republic, Brazil, and China to name a few. Mental health care in the US is seriously lacking.

Racial Discrimination and Violence Against Minorities (Ethnic or racial)

America is a sad 37th.

Educational Attainment

Guess what guys…America has dropped to 16th.

Face i…This country would be far better off deporting Republicans than Illegal Immigrants.

 

Zimmerman Bail Revoked for Lying

Well – at least one lie has caught up with George Zimmerman.  And I am sure someone is going to take a close look at how the $200,000 plus he has collected from Internet donors gets (or got) spent…

Which may wind up being another can of worms.

The fact that Zimmerman lied about the money issue is indicative that he may have lied about a bunch of other stuff – such as that Trayvon attacked him.

“Goes to character, Your Honor!”

George Zimmerman back to jail for ‘falsehoods.’ Will they influence trial?

After seeing public opinion gradually swing his way over the events of Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla.,George Zimmerman’s already tentative credibility took a hit as Circuit Court Judge Kenneth Lester ordered him back to jail for lying at his bond hearing in late April.

Accused of murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, Mr. Zimmerman had posted a $150,000 bond in April after declaring, through his lawyer, that he was out of work and basically indigent. His parents, too, said they had little money.

But a few days later, Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s attorney, told Judge Lester that Zimmerman’s financial situation wasn’t as dire, as he had raised nearly $200,000 through his “The Real George Zimmerman” website.

While Mr. O’Mara pointed to the discrepancy as an innocent mistake, prosecutor Bernie De La Rionda pounced on the misdirection on Friday, saying it – together with Zimmerman’s failure to tell the court about a second passport in his possession – was evidence that he deserves to await trial in a jail cell.

“I don’t know what other words to use [about how much money Zimmerman had] besides that it was a blatant lie,” Mr. De La Rionda said.

O’Mara on Friday argued there was “no deceit” involved since the pair did not use the money for anything.

In revoking the bond, Judge Lester said Zimmerman, who is currently in hiding, shouldn’t be able to benefit from “material falsehoods.” The judge also immediately placed Zimmerman under a “no bond” status, meaning he’ll likely spend the rest of his time awaiting trial in a Seminole County jail cell.  The judge gave Zimmerman 48 hours to report to jail…

Those lying  eyes…Indeed.

 

Truth in Dating – DOJ Looking At Lying on Websites as a Crime

Well… there goes the 5000 under 50 something women on E-Harmony and match – and most of the guys with those fancy jobs and fancy wheels!

The Department of Justice is now saying that lying on personal sites, like the dating sites or Facebook…

Could be a crime.

So much for that “About Average” body type classification on those dating sites!

Athletic and Fit, Driving a Mercedes... Not.

DOJ: Fibbing on web sites should be a crime

The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile.

In a statement obtained by CNET that’s scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues that it must be able to prosecute violations of Web sites’ often-ignored, always-unintelligible “terms of service” policies.

The law must allow “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider,” Richard Downing, the Justice Department’s deputy computer crime chief, will tell the U.S. Congress tomorrow.

Scaling back that law “would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution,” and jeopardize prosecutions involving identity theft, misuse of government databases, and privacy invasions, according to Downing.

The law in question, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, has been used by the Justice Department to prosecute a woman, Lori Drew, who used a fake MySpace account to verbally attack a 13-year old girl who then committed suicide. Because MySpace’s terms of service prohibit impersonation, Drew was convicted of violating the CFAA. Her conviction was later thrown out.

What makes this possible is a section of the CFAA that was never intended to be used that way: ageneral-purpose prohibition on any computer-based act that “exceeds authorized access.” To the Justice Department, this means that a Web site’s terms of service define what’s “authorized” or not, and ignoring them can turn you into a felon.

On the other hand, because millions of Americans likely violate terms of service agreements every day, you’d have a lot of company.

A letter (PDF) sent to the Senate in August by a left-right coalition including the ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and FreedomWorks warns of precisely that. “If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime,” the letter says. “Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law.”

Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crime prosecutor who’s now a professor of law at George Washington University, says the government’s arguments are weak.

Kerr, who is also testifying tomorrow before a House Judiciary subcommittee, told CNET today that:

The Justice Department claims to have an interest in enforcing Terms of Use and computer use policies under the CFAA, but its examples mostly consist of cases in which the conduct described has already been criminalized by statutes other than the CFAA. Further, my proposed statutory fix (see the second proposal in my testimony) would preserve the government’s ability to prosecute the remaining cases DOJ mentions while not raising the civil liberties problems of the current statute…

 

“You’ve Been Served!” – Sherrod Serves Lawsuit Papers to Brietbart at CPAC

Lat year Andrew Brietbart posted a doctored video of Shirley Sherrod resulting in her losing her job, and a huge scandal when it was exposed the video was selectively edited…

Mrs. Sherrod’s Process Server was on hand to meet Mr. Brietbart at CPAC.

Sherrod Sues Breitbart For Damaged Reputation

Blogger Andrew Breitbart has been sued by former U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod who contends her reputation was damaged by Breitbart’s posting last year of an edited video.

The New York Timesreports today Breitbart was served with the lawsuit at CPAC Saturday. Sherrod contends in the suit that a video clip he posted last year “has damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.”

Breitbart, who first posted the clip on July 19, 2010, at his BigGovernment.com site, had been under scrutiny after it was revealed the clip misrepresented Sherrod’s message during a speech in March 2010 before a group of NAACP members.

Fox then posted an online article reporting on the clip, linking to Breitbart’s video. Breitbart did not seek comment from Sherrod prior to his report; Fox News also gave no indication that they had done so. She was forced to resign later that day.

Breitbart has recently claimed that Sherrod was not fired because of his video but because of her part in the 11-year-old Pigford case, in which black farmers sued for discrimination against the Agriculture Department.

He stated such a claim again on Thursday in an interview with Media Matters, in which he admitted he had no proof of the assertion, revealing it was a theory.

Breitbart responded to Sherrod’s lawsuit Saturday with an online statement that said, in part:

I find it extremely telling that this lawsuit was brought almost seven months after the alleged incidents that caused a national media frenzy occurred. It is no coincidence that this lawsuit was filed one day after I held a press conference revealing audio proof of orchestrated and systemic Pigford fraud. I can promise you this: neither I, nor my journalistic websites, will or can be silenced by the institutional Left, which is obviously funding this lawsuit. I welcome the judicial discovery process, including finding out which groups are doing so.

Sherrod could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.

Here’s hoping she also goes after Faux News for aiding and abetting in the crime.