âClinton campaign, Democratic Party to settle campaign finance inquiry for $113Kâ
The Hill. âHillary Clintonâs 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have settled a campaign finance inquiry, agreeing to pay a collective $113,000 in fines that stemmed from the controversial dossier on then-candidate Donald Trumpâs ties to Russia, known as the Steele Dossier. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined the campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for failing to properly report money spent on research for the dossier. The financial penalties came to light in a letter the FEC sent to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, a conservative group, after it filed a complaint. The FEC determined that Clintonâs campaign disclosed the $175,000 it spent on research for the dossier as âlegal services,â but the complainant alleged it was meant for âopposition research done by Fusion .â The funds went to Perkins Coie, the law firm that recruited opposition research group Fusion GPS, which brought on retired British spy Christopher Steele. The regulatory agency noted that political committees must disclose the purpose of expenditures or disbursements that are larger than $200.â ⢠What?! You mean everybody knew the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele Dossier all the time? Say itâs not so! (Money well spent, so far as Iâm concerned, considering the leverage the permanent Clinton campaign got from it.)
BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, MAR 30, 2022 - 03:25 PM
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has fined both Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for lying about funding the Russian "dossier" which underpinned the collusion hoax that hijacked headlines throughout the Trump presidency, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Clinton-funded dossier was also used by the FBI to justify seeking a FISA surveillance (spy) warrant on the Trump campaign.
According to the FEC, Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules governing disclosure of expenditures on opposition research, when they paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS to contract with Steele and cook up propaganda against Trump.
A combined $1,024,407.97 was paid by the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign to law firm Perkins Coie for Fusion GPSâs information, and the party and campaign hid the reason, claiming it was for legal services, not opposition research.
Instead, the DNCâs $849,407.97 and the Clinton campaignâs $175,000 covered Fusion GPSâs opposition research on the dossier, a basis for the so-called âRussia hoaxâ that dogged Trumpâs first term. -Washington Examiner
The dossier, which was assembled by former (?) UK spook Christopher Steele and used now-indicted Russian national Igor Danchenko as its primary source, made wide ranging and salacious allegations against former President Donald Trump, most of which have been debunked.
Somehow we doubt the 'election interference' crowd is going to pipe up over Clinton's meddling in the 2016 US election, using a dossier that undermined Trump's presidency every step of the way.
According to the FEC memo to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation - which filed a complaint over three years ago, Clinton's campaign and the DNC argued that they were simply paying for "legal advice and services," since it was Perkins Coie that actually hired Fusion GPS. The agency, however, says that the law is clear and was violated.
The fines themselves are minuscule - with Clinton's treasurer hit for $8,000 and the DNC's treasurer for $105,000.
The New York Times, a bastion of censorship and corruption, warns the world that âAmerica Has a Free Speech Problem.â
By Tony Lyons, President, Skyhorse Publishing
snip
Thatâs where we are in America today. There is no debate, no public discourse, and we have lost the ability to resolve conflict. We have separated the country into two Americaâs, at least partially because of the policies and practices of the New York Times.
The New York Post has pointed out that the New York Times âpublished lies to serve a biased narrative.â They accused the Times of âmalicious misreportingâ and cite a book called âThe Grey Lady Winkedâ by Ashley Rindsberg.
Rindsberg is quoted as calling the New York Times âa truth-producing machine.â He believes that the âfabrications and distortionsâ theyâve peddled since the 1920s were a system of twisting facts to manipulate public opinion about everything from âHitlerâs Germany and Stalinâs Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War.â The âreportingâ is designed to âsupport a narrative aligned with the corporate whims, economic needs and political preferencesâ of the New York Times. He believes that they have consistently created âfalse narratives.â
The New York Post says the Times has the resources to do it: âWith close to $2 billion in annual revenue, the Times has the money, prestige, experience and stature to set the narratives that other news outlets invariably follow.â
anybody who's been following Elon musk for the past 10 or 15 years knows what a charlatan looks like and so this pandemic has got a variety of charlatans and charlatan behaviors.
Musk has in the past proclaimed that he and his companies are working on exciting products â but often, the proposed innovations aren't realized within the projected timeline.
PUBLISHED MON, MAR 28 2022 6:36 AM EDT UPDATED MON, MAR 28 2022 9:15 AM EDT
Sam Shead@SAM_L_SHEADWATCH LIVEKEY POINTS
The billionaire made the remark after claiming that Twitter doesn't allow for free speech.
"Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy," he wrote on Twitter. "What should be done?"
Musk has in the past proclaimed that he and his companies are working on exciting products â but often, the proposed innovations aren't realized within the projected timeline.
The Onion. âWhen The Onionâs editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness, tolerance, and debate; the other is built upon ignorance, fear, and the suppression of dissent. Today, the path forward could not be clearer. Simply put, we need mass censorship now.â
The NYT, most of the press, and various social media empires are partisan hacks? I'm shocked.
This is why there is so much distrust of the media landscape. This is why conspiracy theorists can get away with fabrications: the media we use to check their claims is often just as dishonest.
The Golden Age of the Global Internet is officially over now resulting not from Russia closing itself off (as you would have suspected earlier) but by censorship and exclusion by Western and the social media platforms and the internet fixtures they control - because they don't trust their own people to hear alternate perspectives and narratives and judge on their own. The world's internet will now break down into regional spheres with limited connectivity. It will be a new, much smaller, less connected, more localized and divisive world.
Mach nur weiter... deine Glaubwürdigkeit is eh hin.
In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country.
Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didnât read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didnât look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all. But our man lived in an Eden, not because it was unspoiled, but because he hadnât considered any other state of affairs. For him, information was in its rightâthat is to say, unquestionedâplace. And that was good, too.
Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphorââthe information ecosystemââwhich suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections.
She looks out at her fellow citizens and sees them as contaminated, like tufted coastal animals after an oil spill, with âdisinformationâ and âmisinformation.â She canât quite define these terms, but she feels that they define the world, online and, increasingly, off.
Everyone scrounges this wasteland for tainted morsels of content, and itâs impossible to know exactly what anyone else has found, in what condition, and in what order. Nevertheless, our American is sure that what her fellow citizens are reading and watching is bad. According to a 2019 Pew survey, half of Americans think that âmade-up news/infoâ is âa very big problem in the country today,â about on par with the âU.S. political system,â the âgap between rich and poor,â and âviolent crime.â But she is most worried about disinformation, because it seems so new, and because so new, so isolable, and because so isolable, so fixable. It has something to do, she knows, with the algorithm. (...)
Hereâs the thing: Smartmatic wasnât even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its foundersâ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.
In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his companyâs name â and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose âlean finely textured beefâ was described by ABC News as âpink slime.â
Mr. Connollyâs target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.
âWeâve gotten to this point where thereâs so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and thatâs what punitive damages can do in a case like this,â Mr. Connolly said.
Mr. Mugica isnât the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that âwe are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.â
These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new âTrump TV,â a giant new media company in the presidentâs image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.
I think the whole Murdoch empire is a bit of an enigma at present. Kind of startling how they pulled the plug on Trump. Maybe it's a succession issue in the family. Or maybe they have other plans about to unfold.
Rupert is pragmatic. He backs the side he thinks is going to win—within reasonable limits. He backed Labour when Tony Blair was on the rise. The WaPo piece below thinks that Fox will project itself as the underdog counterweight to Joe Biden and be even more successful as a result.
It wouldn't surprise me if Rupert is quietly horrified by the monster he helped create, though.
Shep Smith, I think, probably fits the description
The internal tensions at Fox News appear to have contributed to his resignation, according to multiple people at the network and those close to Smith who spoke to The Washington Post for this story. Smith was also in the middle of a long-term contract, making his resignation â and Foxâs agreement to release him â highly unusual.
So did a posse of reporters assemble and claim that Shepard Smith was a threat to their safety, and needed to be removed for his thoughtcrimes? If so they didn't publish a manifesto.
I think the whole Murdoch empire is a bit of an enigma at present. Kind of startling how they pulled the plug on Trump. Maybe it's a succession issue in the family. Or maybe they have other plans about to unfold.
