Liberal Forum

Sgt Bilko » 15 Apr 2017 3:01 am » wrote: Where was your outrage for the much more expensive trips to Hawaii!! Everything there costs significantly more since too much has to be shipped there's!! Went there several times for work. Worked on telemetry equipment at Barking Sands! Took my wife once.

Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dems and Republicans

A review of the surveillance material flagged by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes shows no inappropriate action by Susan Rice or any other Obama administration official, Republican and Democratic Congressional aides who have been briefed on the matter told NBC News.

President Donald Trump told the New York Times he believed former National Security Adviser Rice broke the law by asking for the identities of Trump aides who were mentioned in transcripts of U.S. surveillance of foreign targets.
[......]
Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees from both parties have traveled to NSA headquarters to review the relevant intelligence reports.

"I saw no evidence of any wrongdoing," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents, who would not agree to be identified further. "It was all completely normal."

His assessment was shared by a senior Republican aide who had been briefed on the matter but declined to speak on the record.

Misty » 17 Apr 2017 10:16 pm » wrote: Poor Clem will be so disappointed.
He already had Susan Rice behind bars.

Misty » 17 Apr 2017 10:16 pm » wrote:
Poor Clem will be so disappointed.
He already had Susan Rice behind bars.

Misty » 17 Apr 2017 10:16 pm » wrote: Poor Clem will be so disappointed.
He already had Susan Rice behind bars.

Misty » 17 Apr 2017 10:16 pm » wrote:Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dems and Republicans

Poor Clem will be so disappointed.
He already had Susan Rice behind bars.

Misty » 17 Apr 2017 10:16 pm » wrote:Poor Clem will be so disappointed.
He already had Susan Rice behind bars.

Call It What It Is - Ivanka Trump is carrying obvious conflicts of interest.

In another time—say, one in which Chelsea Clinton was the president's daughter—this would have been a monumental example of naked influence peddling.

Now, it's just another thing we live with, because we are a democratic republic afflicted with Dutch Elm Disease or something.

From the AP:
Why in the living name of Christ are we tap-dancing around what this really is?

It's "difficult" for Ms. Trump to separate her business from her politics?

No, it's not. It's actually easy.

If you take a job as a counselor to the president, and especially if the president is your father, you…get…out…of…the…business. Period.

The only reason that it's "difficult" is that you want to have your wonderful piece of chocolate cake and eat it, too.

Business as usual shouldn't be this usual.

Roger Ailes’ fake news empire: Former Fox News head presided over a panoply of phony “sock puppet” blogs.

Former Fox News CEO paid for many deceptive sites, including leering blogs promoting female Fox personalities.

Since a series of sexual harassment accusations led to the ouster of Roger Ailes as chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel last summer, the managerial culture he created at the network has come under increased scrutiny.

Ailes’ old-fashioned, male-dominated style has been characterized by many former employees as sexist, but another aspect of it has received little attention: the many ways that Fox News was run more like a political operation than a journalistic enterprise.

During the Ailes era, the network’s ferocity in defending itself against inconvenient facts and journalists it deemed unfair became legendary among the small group of people who cover the media business.

Under its former head, the network employed a team of “black room” operators who allegedly obtained phone records and credit reports of reporters disliked by Ailes.

According to news reports, private investigators working for the company were dispatched to follow journalists, apparently to find out whom they were meeting.

According to sources, sometimes Fox News corporate funds were used for such endeavors; other times, Ailes paid for them himself.

That ultra-aggressive approach to promotion during the Ailes era also extended to the online world, where Fox News employees and contractors were dispatched to do battle against not just mainstream media reporters but also against small-time bloggers and even website commenters.

Fox News even went so far as to create at least two anonymous websites that attacked the competition.

This strategy of online fakery — a practice known as creating “sock puppet” accounts, in internet parlance — was an outgrowth of the corporate culture established by Ailes when he launched
the channel at the behest of media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996.

With a background in Republican politicking instead of news reporting, Ailes infused his fledgling operation with the ethos of a political campaign.

Nearly eight months removed from Ailes’ leadership, executives at Fox News and its parent company 21st Century Fox are still discovering some of the arcane structures and methods he once employed.

Under Ailes, Fox News did not limit its promotion efforts to the realm of media criticism.

The network also retained the services of a now-defunct public relations firm called New Media Strategies to create and operate a series of homespun-looking websites designed to market women who worked as hosts or correspondents in a manner that can only be described as overtly sexist.

Creating and operating the websites was part of a larger series of marketing services that New Media Strategies provided Fox News. Bill Shine, the network’s current co-president and a former right-hand man to Ailes, was the primary point of contact on the New Media Strategies account, although there is no evidence he knew of the sock puppet sites’ existence during the roughly 12 months that they were published.

A Fox News spokeswoman said that New Media Strategies “did work solely for former CEO and chairman Roger Ailes” and that Shine was not aware of the websites until Salon began reporting this story.

New Media Strategies employees created several blogs dedicated to specific women, including former correspondent Laurie Dhue and former “Fox and Friends” co-host Kiran Chetry, all of which were linked into a larger portal website called Girls of Fox News, which described itself this way:
While the site occasionally made forays into media criticism — two November 2006 posts attacked the liberal nonprofit group Media Matters — the vast majority of the content on Girls of Fox News consisted of frequently misspelled reactions to unintentionally suggestive screenshots, and videos of Fox News Channel employees crossing their legs or appearing to make kissing gestures.

Megyn Kelly, a former anchor who left the network last year after accusing Roger Ailes of sexually harassing her, was a frequent target of the site’s demeaning admiration. A Feb. 20, 2007, post commented on a photo of Kelly:
The blog entry was filed by its author under the categories “Single,” “party in my pants” and “Girls Gone Wild,” among several others.

Many other women were praised in even more disrespectful terms, including Courtney Friel, a former Fox News reporter who is now an anchor at a Los Angeles-area TV station.

“Who wouldnt want to cop a Friel?” the site asked on Feb. 22, 2007, after posting a picture of the journalist wearing a low-cut shirt.

Alisyn Camerota, now a host at CNN, was also a target of the site’s lurid admiration and was once described as a “bimbo” in an August 2006 post.

A post the following January congratulated her on giving birth to a son: “Nates future friends will enjoy hanging out at the Camerota household for some milf and cookies.”

Milf is an offensive slang term often used in pornography, an abbreviation for “mom I’d like to ****.”

During its operation, Girls of Fox News featured scores of similarly degrading remarks about female employees of Fox News, along with frequent appeals to watch the latest launch or relaunch of various network programs.

While the site has not functioned in nearly 10 years, the domain girlsoffoxnews.com appears to have been continuously renewed by its owner.

That individual or entity has also chosen to use a privacy protection service that anonymizes it from public-record searches.

Web users typing in the domain today are redirected to a Yahoo search for “Fox News” or “Breaking News,” via a domain monetization company called Sedo.

In an April 5 statement, Pete Snyder, the former CEO of New Media Strategies, denied any connection with Girls of Fox News:
According to two sources, it is possible that Snyder may not have known about the fake fan websites, since New Media Strategies employees and third-party contractors were frequently given enormous autonomy on projects.

Another source who formerly worked at New Media Strategies, however, expressed doubt that Snyder could have been completely unaware of the sites or their content.

Within New Media Strategies, according to several former employees, the Fox News business was regarded as Snyder’s account.

He was even, for several years, described as a “Fox News contributor.”

Although Girls of Fox News was shuttered in 2007, careful readers were able to peruse some of the site’s content through the use of the Wayback Machine, a service provided by the Internet Archive that lets users view virtual snapshots of websites as they appeared at various times in the past.

As Salon began reporting this story by interviewing Snyder and others familiar with the New Media Strategies and Fox News relationship, the owner of girlsoffoxnews.com appears to have devised a method to remove the blog from the Wayback Machine.

This required the use of a file called robots.txt, which can be configured to block archiving software like that used by the Internet Archive. Salon did not tell Snyder about the Dhue and Chetry websites and as of this writing they remain publicly accessible.

As might be expected, the operator of the domain did not respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after the Girls of Fox News site was removed from the Wayback Machine, this reporter was contacted by Stephanie Cutter, the former deputy campaign manager of Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Cutter’s connection to Snyder and New Media Strategies is unclear.

In an email correspondence, she said she was acting on Snyder’s behalf only as “a long time friend.”

She repeatedly asked this reporter to make clear that New Media Strategies had not engaged in online trolling operations on behalf of Fox News.

Cutter also suggested that Fox News might well be the current owner of the girlsoffoxnews.com domain.

“If NMS registered the URL for aggregation purposes, at most they would have registered it for a year before turning it over to Fox,” she wrote in an email.

A representative for Fox News denied that the network was the current operator or owner of the Chetry, Dhue or Girls of Fox News blogs.

While the fake fan sites have remained virtually unknown, the Ailes response machine has received some coverage over the years.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik wrote extensively about Fox News’s obsession with dominating the online conversation in his2013 biography of Murdoch.

“There was the expectation that the PR people would have read 100, 200, 300 comments deep on some relatively obscure blog post critical of one of their on-air talents,” he told Salon in an interview.

“If that comment had not been mocked, addressed, or flamed online, some of the PR staffers would get calls as early as 2 in the morning asking, ‘Why haven’t you dealt with this?'” Folkenflik said.

As part of the network’s efforts to sway public opinion, Folkenflik reported, Fox News employees were required to purchase USB portable hot spots and secondhand laptops for the sole purpose of creating sock puppet accounts to attack journalists who were deemed enemies of Ailes.

Fox News staffers also tried other methods to mold the opinions of bloggers and commentators who were popular within the media industry.

According to a knowledgeable source, the network’s publicity staff regularly provided proprietary ratings data to Brian Stelter, now a host for CNN, when he was operating an anonymous, independent blog called Cable Newser in the early 2000s. (Stelter did not respond to a request for comment.)

Over time, Ailes and his inner circle came to the opinion that Stelter was an unfair liberal and decided to take matters into their own hands through the creation of an anonymous TV news blog of their own called The Cable Game. It was launched in July 2005, as a separate project run by the black room operatives rather than the Fox News PR department.

The sock puppet site, whose true origins were first disclosed by New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman in his extensive 2014 biography of Ailes, was supposedly written by an anonymous woman.

It was actually the work of a team headed by former Fox News contributor Jim Pinkerton, according to two sources familiar with its operations.

Pinkerton did not respond to attempts to contact him for this story.

A Fox News representative declined to comment on The Cable Game except to say, “Jim Pinkerton is no longer with the network.”

A GOP campaign veteran, Pinkerton was an ideal choice for the job.

He had worked for Ailes since the 1980s and even served as the ghostwriter for an autobiography that the Fox News founder ultimately declined to publish.

Pinkerton was also a regular panelist on the network’s former media discussion show “Fox News Watch,” a perch he used several times to promote his pseudonymous blog during its six-year run, which ended in 2011. (An unauthorized archive created by a spammer is still available online as of this writing.)

Beyond frequently promoting Pinkerton himself, The Cable Game was shameless in its shilling for Ailes’ network.

The sock puppet blog also took a number of digs at competitors, particularly Paula Zahn, a news anchor who had left Fox News in 2001 for CNN, in a move that enraged Ailes.

On the first day the site was in operation, The Cable Game attacked Zahn’s appearance in a post commenting about a photo of her:
A year later, the sock puppet blog referred to Zahn’s hairstyle as “the equivalent of a dead cat” in a post that described her and several other female television journalists as “the bearded ladies of national news.” In a 2007 post claiming that Zahn had “always epitomized what was wrong with TV news,” the site fondly recalled Ailes’ parting shot about Zahn, when he claimed he could get better ratings in her time slot with a “dead raccoon.”

In addition to operating The Cable Game, the Fox News black ops team also began subsidizing the work of a Michigan lawyer turned blogger named Mark Koldys, known online as Johnny Dollar, according to a source.

Koldys, who did not respond to an interview request, has defended Fox News and attacked its left-leaning critics online for many years. He began in July of 2004 with a blog called Johnny Dollar’s Place: Cable News Truth, whose first posts were dedicated to attacking an anti-Fox News documentary called “Outfoxed.”

The site was frequently promoted on The Cable Game.

Besides writing for his own site (which still publishes material but apparently is no longer subsidized by Fox News), Koldys also frequently wrote for a now-defunct blog called OlbermannWatch, a site set up in late 2004 to criticize and parody former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.

The creator of that site, Robert Cox, said in an interview that Koldys denied being paid by Fox News at the time.

Cox further added that he had not been paid by Fox News.

The Fox News spokeswoman said that Koldys had not been paid by the network to the best of her knowledge. A legal representative for Ailes did not respond when contacted for this story.

Updated at 11:21 a.m. ET:
This story has been updated to clarify Fox News Channel’s position on its relationship to Mark Koldys.

Misty » 18 Apr 2017 3:30 pm » wrote:Call It What It Is - Ivanka Trump is carrying obvious conflicts of interest.

Misty » 18 Apr 2017 3:30 pm » wrote:

CENTCOM: Afghanistan bombing statements were 'inappropriate.

The Pentagon is walking back comments a U.S. Central Command employee gave to The Hill regarding the use of one of the military's largest non-nuclear bombs during an operation in Afghanistan.

The employee, who identified themselves as a CENTCOM spokesperson, gave candid comments to The Hill regarding the use of the munition, referred to as the “Mother of all Bombs,” on a series of tunnels used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“Statements published on April 13 attributed to USCENTCOM were made by an individual unauthorized to speak on behalf of U.S. Central Command and do not reflect the professionalism of CENTCOM,” CENTCOM media chief Maj. Josh Jacques said in a statement.

"These statements fail to portray the values of more than 80,000 service members of the U.S. military currently serving in the CENTCOM area of responsibility," Jacques added.

"Our media engagement mission is to provide accurate, impartial information to the public and their media representatives worldwide. Those inappropriate statements do not reflect the official views of CENTCOM or its leadership."

Jacques added that unofficial statements "undermine the confidence of the public who expect more responsible and thoughtful insight.

As military spokesmen ... a higher quality of service will be delivered in the future."

“When you have a very large beehive, a little flyswatter may not work, so finally you take out the big stuff.

We just found a huge beehive and we have to use something more than the fly swatter.

It’s empowering the commanders and winning the war against the bad guys.

In this administration, the military is given empowerment to do what we need to do.

We mean business.

President Trump said prior that once he gets in he’s going to kick the S-H-I-T out of the enemy.

That was his promise and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Afghanistan has, for a little while, been the forgotten war but there’s a lot of action over there, there’s a lot of dangers.

If we’re going to be engaged in a war we’re going to be engaged in a conflict to win, period.”

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/32878 ... fghanistan

U.S. aircraft carrier supposedly sent as warning to North Korea sailed in opposite direction.

Team Trump declared last week that it was sending North Korea a tough message when the US diverted an aircraft carrier strike force toward the Korean Peninsula — but the ships were actually thousands of miles away and heading in the opposite direction.

The White House on Tuesday blamed the Defense Department for the embarrassing debacle, according to The New York Times, which first reported the story.

The Defense Department blamed what turned out to be fake news by describing a series of foul-ups, including a “premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis,” the paper reported.

So while the administration announced that the armada was steaming toward the Sea of Japan as a deterrent to Kim Jong-un’s belligerence, it was 3,500 miles away in the Indian Ocean heading for joint maneuvers with the Australian Navy.

The White House announcement about the nuclear-armed strike force sparked fears across East Asia about a looming catastrophe – as rising tensions between the North and the US dominated the news.

Many feared the move signaled a preemptive strike, which President Trump had refused to rule out.

The mixup was revealed on Monday when the Navy posted a photo of the Carl Vinson sailing through the Sunda Strait separating the islands of Sumatra and Java in Indonesia.

The photo was taken on Saturday, days after Trump spokesman Sean Spicer touted the ships’ mission in the Sea of Japan.

“The forward deployment is deterrence, presence. It’s prudent. But it does a lot of things. It ensures our — we have the strategic capabilities, and it gives the President options in the region,” Spicer said on April 11.

“I think when you see a carrier group steaming into an area like that, the forward presence of that is clearly, through almost every instance, a huge deterrence.”

Trump fanned the flames with a Twitter post the same day.

“North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.,” he wrote.

The strike force has now been redirected and is heading toward the Korean Peninsula.

The White House would not comment on the gaffe, referring questions to the Pentagon.

Misty » 11 Apr 2017 3:56 pm » wrote:Sean Spicer Implies Hitler Didn't Gas His Own People
The Holocaust centers?

Termin8tor » 11 Apr 2017 4:00 pm » wrote:
Oh geez, is this the best you can do?

Misty » 11 Apr 2017 4:21 pm » wrote: I wonder how 45 feels now that HE is the target of Putin's disinformation campaign?

Termin8tor » 13 Apr 2017 3:01 pm » wrote: Hey psycho, he's being far, far tougher on Putin than Barry or the female felon.

Cannonpointer » 18 Apr 2017 11:48 pm » wrote: WHO SAYS THAT PUTIN IS LYING? LINK?

Cannonpointer » 18 Apr 2017 11:50 pm » wrote:How?