A Fine Line - The Misinformation Age

Glen Greenwald's tweet had me thinking:

1] Trump and the MSM

Saying everything that contradicts is "Fake News" is blatantly untrue. My disagreement with the MSM has usually been with the interpretation of the facts and their lack of real investigative journalism. In fact it is more what they do not report than what they report upon. Their opinion pages should be taken with a large dose of salt. Trump's/Bannon's methodology is straight out of the play-book "Dictatoring for Dummies".

2] The Deep State.

With the passing by both parties of the Patriot Act and its various vile offspring and iterations have created a monster. Its past nefarious actions around the world are now being repeated openly within the US itself, hang onto your hats.

3] Interfering with other countries elections

Let's be honest here it has been a national pastime of the US since..well..ever, notice how quickly the great British lapdog rushed across the Atlantic to embrace the hair. Russians interfering with US elections, sure I would expect them to. However influencing the result to such a degree as claimed by the losing side requires real proof.

4] Oligarchy

As usual plying both sides in this, as usual no matter what happens they'll prosper under the current sham of a duopoly. It is a crying shame that they own most of the media and no doubt and their banks possess some interesting facts about Trump to boot.

5] American Exceptionalism

The toxic brew that enables anything to be sold then pardoned. Xenophobia and ignorance the result.

6] The duopoly

The myth that your votes really matter has been well sold, wedge issues the driving force. It is more a cult of personality [the presidential elections the summit of this farce] than a political system. In the end the same people decide.

Holding all of these ideas in your head is pretty easy, the really hard thing to do is to see any of it in black or white. After all we live in a world where misdirection, misinformation and blatant propaganda have become the norm rather than the exception. Therefore it is perfectly normal that the twin horrors of Trump and the Deep State exist or that government has not served "we the people" for most of its existence. Fear and loathing has been the plat du jour for so long now its been integrated into the American Dream.

The way I am trying to look at it is: If something is designed to make me jealous of or hate someone else under a "grouping" it has been designed for nefarious purposes. Most people I know fall in the "grey" area, the ones that see [or give the impression of seeing] the world in black and white, in my opinion, are the ones to be avoided at all cost.

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Alligator Ed's picture

My disagreement with the MSM has usually been with the interpretation of the facts and their lack of real investigative journalism.

It is not just a lack of investigative journalism. MSM has consistently failed to even mention very important, newsworthy events. I will cite one instance only, an ongoing one: DAPL persecution by the fascist North Dakota government. Yeah, I could name plenty more but that would deprive other commentators here of their chance to do so.

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@Alligator Ed

In fact it is more what they do not report than what they report upon

They became infotainment rather than informative. The 24/7 news cycle was possibly their death knell.

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Alligator Ed's picture

@LaFeminista You got it just right. Please have mercy on an old alligator that doesn't do well in the dark.

Sad

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@Alligator Ed because it is complicated and the dumbing down for profit has not helped in the slightest.

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@LaFeminista

I watched Trump's whole press conference the other day, and their reporting of it was downright dishonest. I sat there watching CBS sum it up afterward, saying repeatedly, "That's not what he said!" At least Major Whatsisname had the grace to look guilty (and unwashed) when he did it. And the reporting later, while it did certainly leave out a lot of important things, like the mention of Hillary turning over 20% of our uranium to Russia, really misrepresented what was actually said. It was dishonest. Very slanted.

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@Sunspots They were both full of it.

I watched the whole circus in disgust.

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@Sunspots

If watched without visceral preconceptions, whether we like him or not (he's
New York New Rich crude often, a very lower class style often), he ate the reporters' lunch. He was calm, pleasant, and in control of the press conference - which has a lot to do with how he got elected, despite all the media and elites steadily sneering at him. We need to be clear-eyed about those things. A lot of the press and the commentary afterwards was venomous (and he talked about the hatred among them, too) - on top of misleading.

I think we should keep our focus on clear policy points, and try to avoid personality, or we risk cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

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@Sunspots Trump came out looking for a fight, the press obliged and fed his ego. They should have asked some totally unexpected questions.

It was farcical on so many levels.

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@LaFeminista @LaFeminista

and one of the permaculture principles is that The Problem is the Solution..

For instance, don't be angry if the only land you can afford is a rocky, steep, north-facing hilltop, instead of a rich gently southern-sloping bottom land meadow. How can you take advantage, with the least effort/change, of what you can get? We can't plow it up for corn (and maybe that's what we had our hearts set on), and it isn't as pretty as that meadow, but without the need to bring in heavy earth-moving equipment it is perfect for an orchard. The spring blooms are much less apt to be frost nipped, losing your year's crop of fruit, than in that pretty meadow. Once it's established, it needs much less ongoing work.

Maybe Trump is our rocky north slope? He sure isn't everything we wanted, but even Bernie was pretty imperfect on foreign policy. We can't just write off all our goals now, and Trump has said some good things, like wanting peace with Russia and not invading the whole world. We don't know what will happen, but do we give up on our goals just because someone unclassy says he wants the same thing? You think he won't follow through? Maybe not. But also maybe. Let's not give up before we definitely and finally lose.

Let's see what we can get from Trump. We won't get everything we want, but no WW3 means we can keep trying. No TPP means corporations don't have a veto on our laws yet, so we can keep trying for the rest.

We are still influenced by the MSM, in spite of all we know that most people don't, and I think we're even influenced a little by Hillary's ugly campaign. But I think we really need to keep a cold hard eye on the ball, the policies we need. Sure, we won't get them all from Trump, but let's focus on what we can grow amongst the rocks.

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@Sunspots

when he told the reporters that their coverage of him has been so obviously biased, that they are damaging their own credibility more than his. No way the post-presser coverage was in any way objective or even remotely fair to Trump. The intent of his words (whether one agrees with him or not) is being deliberately misrepresented. Certainly this must be apparent to Trump's many supporters, since it's even apparent to me -- and I am anything but a Trump supporter.

The msm hacks are so confident of their ability to shape public opinion, that they've been badly over-playing their hand. Trump knows this, and he even warned them about it, but they remain blissfully unaware that they are losing (or have already lost) the confidence of a very large segment of their audience.

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native

@Alligator Ed

Can I add outright lying, as with CNN during the 1st Dem Primary debate altering their own online poll to reverse the votes in order to initially make Hillary have Bernie's numbers, while repeatedly wiping comments from the thread, (yup, saw that happening myself in real time) and with various corporate media outlets repeating the 'chair-throwing by Bernie-Bros' and all of the other nonsense intended to convince voters that Bernie had no chance or had already lost the nomination he actually won, even with all of the Dem cheating, corporate media black-outs and propaganda.

Luckily, it seems that now most Americans know better than to blindly believe the corporate media.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

riverlover's picture

expanded to industries, not exactly government employees there. Think Snowden, harassed to leak and run. And all were Enemies of the State, including Assange, who AFAIK, has never even visited the US. And warfare between agencies: was that not why dots were not connected before 9/11? According to some, anyway; no sharing between FBI and CIA then. And then expanded NSA.

Too many spy agencies, too many fiefdoms in there now.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Bisbonian's picture

@riverlover . Probably two too many.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

@Bisbonian

Any government of any country pouring its citizens resources and very life-blood into far and away the world's largest military used to intimidate, attack and invade other people's countries and 17 spy agencies spying on everyone is very, very clearly up to no good, even without all of the other evidence. They've exceeded Hitler already and enough is enough.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

important but drops it within 24 hours not to mention it again. An example would be the ongoing daily disaster that is Fukushima where every day vast amount of radiation are loosed upon the earth and the Pacific ocean and is readily detectable on the west coast of North America. In my opinion, this, and others like it, is a massive failure to keep the public informed.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

@duckpin It's like the Russians! thing. Now it has become fact for many, even though the facts have not been established.

It is lazy journalism...i.e. infotainment.

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@LaFeminista that Trump may be a disaster for the nation but he's a cash cow for CBS. This was during the primary campaign. CBS, and the others, gave Trump millions of dollars worth of free air time to bolster the bottom line of the corporation.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

@duckpin

May I add that Trump got hundreds of millions in free coverage from the corporate media?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Alligator Ed's picture

@duckpin showing the Evil Queen wanted to promote Trump, or Cruz. or Carson to the head of the opposition's KlownKar?

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@LaFeminista

Smells to me like propaganda. This viewpoint would be supported by Obama's 'legalization' of US government propaganda against even American citizens in their own country.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@duckpin

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@LaFeminista because "I feel your pain" : )

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Lily O Lady's picture

@duckpin

Jon Benet Ramsey. They're still "covering" that! /s

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

@Lily O Lady get saturation coverage while an existential issue like climate change is not assigned to an ongoing investigation.

Good point - glad I missed this though

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Lily O Lady's picture

@duckpin

my eyes and let it wash over me.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

ZimInSeattle's picture

friends and family from falling into the disinformation trap. Thank dog for independent media. I found this essay to be quite informative: Blood in the Water: the Trump Revolution Ends in a Whimper

Another excellent source is the new podcasts by The Intercept: Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill

A new 1 hour podcast every Wednesday with some of the best journalists out there.

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"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020

@ZimInSeattle is there a download available? I followed all the links and could find nothing. Too bad if they are limiting their audience to streaming only. Oh well, thanks anyway. Or, thanks in advance for a direct link, if I somehow missed it that is totally possible. Smile

PEACE

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@eyo

Nakedcapitalism.com , zerohedge.com, and thesaker.is . Naked Capitalism is more than economics and very respectable. They're suing the WaPo. You have to sort through the Zerohedge articles to avoid the rabidly capitalist ones, but some are very informative. The Saker is mostly international relations; he was a UN analyst and had training in military strategy. Some is still over my nonmilitary head, but I think it's solid.

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@Sunspots thanks for those, I don't mean "interesting" as in trying to be polite, I mean literally. Yes I read NC almost every day, the work Yves has done on CalPers is amazing. Scary amazing. Also the reporting on our corrupted coastal commission. One of my most valued treasures is (a book of course), copy of first and only edition of the California Coastal Resource Guide. Public coastal access is one of the reasons everyone on earth wants to come here, I think. It has been fantastic, look how long the coastline it is, yeah baby. But like everything else, access is being slowly eroded by greedy millionaires.

I didn't see thesake.is before, thanks. Last week I couldn't believe myself making a bookmark to breitbart but there is interesting stuff there too, some of it news, haha. I am quite lasered in on local and state politics at the moment. Almost full time rant. Heh.

Saying again, I don't begrudge anyone their millions, but iTunes? Is there not enough offshore money yet? Have any dollars been invested near their San Francisco offices to build permanent homes for the permanent homeless their system helps create? That is where I am with BigTech and the rest. More creativity, less greed please. A new system better appear, because their old one is getting torn to shreds.

Why does political talk need commercial advertisers? Free speech, war is peace, etc.. What I really like about c99 is different viewpoints not heavy moderation. I don't like it when one of us flames out in public and ends up banned because we forgot how to talk to each other about differences. None of us can agree upon everything, but maybe one or two, or ten or twenty things. Why fight each other? The only way to find out is to keep going. Me, I just can't wait to vote for something because I have no money. My personal boycotts don't mean shit, my reps don't pick up the phone. Completely disenfranchised from "the system" is how it feels.

PEACE

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@eyo

Hard to keep up with everything, but this site and a couple others offer really good summaries and histories of the issues. And good, issue-focused discussions. It helps.

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@Sunspots years. You want to go down that extreme right wing rabbit hole be my guest/

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@LaFeminista

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@LaFeminista yeah but it's one of the most popular sewers around, isn't it? I still have a bookmark to dailykos/diaries too, that less popular leach field of stink.

The entire web has become a big boring template of meh in my eyes, on the surface no new ideas, no really big thinkers, no actual solutions except more commerce, less nature. And beneath that surface, javascript? Are you effing kidding me? This is what it's come to, streaming a bunch of binary corporate advertising crap, to read a few paragraphs of text. American exceptionalism, all crammed through port 80 'cause we're so smart. Heh.

PEACE

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Deja's picture

And Trump was right saying that the intelligence community has been doing it for a long time.

My mom and stepdad have become all Fox News all the time since the election. It's sad, but Mom refuses to read (even before the fake news lie about independent websites), and the stepdad has been listening to hate radio preaching all day long for as long as I can remember.

MSM lies really get me. Rather than calling a protest a protest, they call it a riot. Rather than report on reporters getting arrested, or private security guards physically assaulting protesters who are kneeling, they report on how many people were at a freaking inauguration or the Russians. Even Democracy Now spent a good portion of the program talking about the freaking inauguration. Sad.

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MsDidi's picture

And we must pay attention to both points in Greenwald's tweet. Folks who pay attention only to #1 are missing the fact that in the interclass warfare that is going on, neither the neo-liberals nor the Trump-ites represent the interests of 99% of the people. Getting caught up in Trump-isms has its own very high risks. If it feels cathartic and good to some to prove how smart they are by piling on to "how stupid he his" maybe they just should leave this grandstanding to the mainstream media that, like Hillary, focuses only on what's deplorable about Trump. Time to start paying attention to the broader picture of what's happening.
I remember an analysis of how George Bush beat Al Gore in the debates. The New Yorker suggested turning off the sound on the television and watching the body language -- ie, don't get confused by how much smarter you are than Bush. He was leaning into the mike, focusing on the people in the audience and showing a genuine interest while Gore was harumphing. I will never forget that lesson. Trump's got that down -- the neoliberals are harumphing. Where does our true interest lie? With Obama and Hillary -- the chief frackers of all time -- with the president who enshrined the Heritage Foundation's health plan as Obamacare? With Trump who makes a mockery of all democratic values and processes? With the mainstream media that suppresses most important news and development. Or with the vast majority of people who are served by neither of the 2 parties, the duopoly that jointly collaborates with mainstream media in shutting down everyone else?

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@MsDidi knife in the drawer.

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ggersh's picture

@LaFeminista @LaFeminista 17 FEBRUARY 2017 http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Three Day Weekend - Times of General Corruption

"And I'll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which is just an absolute for this whole thing. In 2015, Wall Street Bonuses, not regular compensation, bonuses, seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totaled $29.4 billion dollars. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who makes minimum wage totaled $14 billion...

The era of neo-liberalism is over. The era of neo-nationalism has just begun."

Mark Blyth

"Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one— happiness and love."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: The Time of Nero

When historians look back on this period of the last forty years and diagnose what went wrong, they might do worse than to conclude that at the root of it was a general failure of character, from the top down.

The replacing of honor and duty with egoism and greed as the most honored of civic virtues was a long and slow process. It took root and was nurtured in a portion of the population that was served by it during the Reaganomics revolution, but eventually spread to those institutions and groups that had generally provided a bulwark for freedom and justice against the perennial amorality of the greedy.

Although they were certainly not the root cause of it, the Clintons played a prominent role in sealing the deal between the political and the financial class, and throwing the whole thing into a higher gear. They made political corruption, which heretofore had been hidden in the closets, fashionable.

Indeed, it may not be too much to say that they were to soft corruption in politics what Henry Ford was to automobile production. They certainly did not invent it, and were probably not the worst compared to some of their colleagues across the aisle, but they industrialized it, and knocked down the last bastions of public conscience in the process by showing how well greed could pay off while still maintaining some semblance of public respectability.

There will be a three day weekend in the US markets because of President's Day on Monday.

There was some surprisingly good 'soft' data this week in the Philly Fed and Empire Manufacturing reports. Let us see if those translate into good, hard economic numbers.

The crux of the problem is the huge imbalance between corporate power and the ability of worker's to achieve increasing wages. Without increasing wages, broader aggregate demand in the form of consumption cannot be sustained.

It was sustained during a long period of wage stagnation by innovative debt instruments associated with the housing bubble that was greatly encouraged by the financial sector and their servants in the political and professional classes. The fraud which they helped to perpetuate was conscious and pre-meditated. The crafted specific financial offerings towards that purpose.

However, in the aftermath of the housing bubble collapse, the ability and willingness of the average American to go into debt for ordinary consumption is reluctant to say the least. At least half the nation is living paycheck to paycheck with little to no savings.

This is not going to end well or easily as you might expect. However, the elites have been winning for so long, and are so full of themselves, and so firmly committed to their schemes that I think they will finally let the whole thing hit the wall in some way, and then make the people another deal that they cannot refuse, as they had done with the bank bailouts in 2008.

And that is where the right preparations and the willingness to do what is required of this generation will be most important.

No one ever said that it would be easy, or that we would be going to heaven on featherbeds.

I find the current political situation to be as bad as I thought it would be when I forecasted it about ten years ago. The worst is yet to come.

The corruption in the system is becoming much more apparent. The extreme biases in the mainstream media in favor of their particular owner's faction is fairly obvious.

The liberal establishment, in their zeal to excuse themselves and their failure to support the working class, is embracing a kind of McCarthyism with an ease that is almost astonishing in its hypocrisy. The hypocrisy on display at MSNBC is almost as embarrassing as that on Fox News.

That the Wall Street Democrats brought their own political failure on themselves by their strong and enduring pivot to the wealthier urban professionals is something that escapes their consciousness.

And on the other hand, the Republican establishment is gone bananas in their service to greed. I figure if they are able to beat down Trump like the Democrats beat down Bernie, then we are in for a real reckoning.

This is nothing new. Indeed, this resembles the America of the past more than most people realize. Our education is slanted and poor, and our national self-image is a masterpiece of public relations.

The discussing of politics is 'fun' and avoids having to make comments on what is certainly a confusing period in American economics. I try to stay on that topic, especially since so few are actually shedding light on it these days. But truth be told, money and politics are all about power, and nevermore as in times of general corruption.

This is the worst, most sluggish 'recovery' we have seen in modern times here. But since it has a bipartisan stamp, it is difficult for some to wrap their politically black and white heads around it.

And I hate to resort to it, but in historical terms what we are seeing is more like a 'class war' from ages long ago than any kind of financial new era. The moneyed class turned the law and the thought leaders framing to their own benefit, and would now do anything they can to keep their ill-gotten gains.

Wrap it up in a credibility trap and tie a bow around it, and here we are.

Have a pleasant weekend. See you on Tuesday.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

TheOtherMaven's picture

@ggersh
1870-1900 is the last time when greed rode so high and the two parties were so indistinguishable. During the peak of it, it was even possible for a Democratic President to be followed by a Republican and then for the *same* Democrat to oust that Republican for the only non-consecutive two terms in US history (Cleveland-Harrison-Cleveland).

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

ggersh's picture

@TheOtherMaven Bush, clinton bush, O being clinton jr., clinton or bush again
this time interrupted by trump, but the rumors of her heinous and family
along with all the bushes in the wings await us.

meritocracy means a silver/golden spoon or a 4 year stay at an ivy league.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Big Al's picture

accusations?

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@Big Al they keep playing along as they did in the election season. The best way would be for them not to show up to his press conferences at all, empty seats would annoy him more than anything and the Trump circus would struggle to fill the void.

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