"THEY'RE COMING TO CLEVELAND TO DIE"

Ben Domenech from The Federalist wasn’t accepting the spin from his fellow Republican panelists on Sunday’s “Face the Nation.” While Matt Schlapp from the American Conservative Union was insisting that new VP pick Mike Pence and presidential nominee Donald Trump were going to unite Republicans.

Schlapp explained that he has people on his board that were in the #NeverTrump category who are tempered by Trump’s pick for VP. “I have anecdotal evidence that this is happening across the country,” he swore.

Domenech, however, laid down the hard truth.

“The Pence pick does not change the fact that the Republican Party is now the party of Donald Trump,” he said, while Schlapp insisted he was wrong.

“A hundred and fifty years ago this party was begun by Abraham Lincoln on the idea that Constitutional rights were not bound by race or creed. That the American eagle’s wings were broad enough to accept all that would come here. Now, this party is coming to Cleveland to die,” Domenech continued.

“This is not the party of Abraham Lincoln anymore. It is the party of Donald Trump. It has traded statesmanship for xenophobia,” he said alluding to Trump’s ban on Muslims. “It has traded free markets for protectionism. It has traded the higher principles of our better angels for the belief in party identity politics. That is why they are getting zero percent of the black vote in Pennsylvania. That is why you’re going to continue to see this kind of race-baiting approach to politics. I think it’s completely true that this is the end of the party of Lincoln.”

Schlapp broke in, insisting that the kind of words Domenech was spreading were what you’re hearing out of the Washington, DC Beltway elite, despite the fact that Trump just nominated Pence, a member of the Beltway elite, who was supported by the Beltway elite. “They love their country and they simply want to take it back,” he concluded from the record number of supporters that voted for Trump.

“They are desperate for change,” Domenech agreed. “They are desperate for something different than what the elites who have failed them for far too long. But they have turned in their desperation to a man who they don’t fully understand and who’s not going to deliver on his promises.”

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STAFF WRITER

NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS

Bill Maher last night in his New Rules section, visited the Brian Williams debacle and his take on what news should be.

You see Bill Maher doesn’t really care that much for Brian Williams‘ series of misstatements. No, the real reason Williams should “go away,” according to Maher, is that “NBC Nightly News sucks.” (But to be fair, he also thinks CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight suck too.)

See, what “destroyed” Brian Williams’ credibility in Maher’s eyes was “ten years of wasting precious news time with bullshit stories.” It really bothers him that national nightly newscasts shirk their “sacred responsibility” to report the news in favor of viral YouTube videos, cutesy human interest stories, and lots and lots of weather coverage.

Maher called it “journalistic malpractice” for Williams to spend so little time reporting on climate change and instead covering east coast blizzards “like white Godzilla is on the way.

VIDEO COURTESY OF HBO






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Blogger-In-Chief

Roger West

ALASKAN REPORTER GOES OUT IN A "BLAZE" OF GLORY

Charlo Greene told her boss what many of us would to tell our boss, "fuck it, I quit"





YouTube latest sensation Charlo Greene, a reporter for CBS affiliate KTVA-TV in Anchorage, Alaska, quit her job live on air Sunday night after announcing that she owned a medical marijuana business.

According to the Alaska Dispatch News, Greene did a report on the Alaska Cannabis Club on the 10 p.m. news. At the end of the report, she revealed herself as the owner of the club and said she was quitting her job at the station to devote her time to legalizing marijuana in Alaska.

KTVA 11 apologized for the outburst on its Facebook page:

Dear Viewers,

We sincerely apologize for the inappropriate language used by a KTVA reporter during her live presentation on the air tonight. The employee has been terminated.

Bert Rudman
News Director - KTVA 11 News

After quitting, Greene posted an Indiegogo page to raise $5,000 to go toward campaigning for marijuana legislation. From the page:

I'm Charlo Greene, the president and CEO of the Alaska Cannabis Club — Alaska's only legal medical marijuana resource. I just quit my news reporting job on live TV to announce that I am redirecting all of my energy toward helping to end a failed drug policy that has ruined the lives of far too many Americans. 

Ballot Measure 2, the initiative to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Alaska, isn't just about marijuana in the Last Frontier, it's about keeping the ball rolling on NATIONAL legalization. Imagine, if after Colorado and Washington have legalized recreational marijuana and are offering the rest of the world a positive outlook on what ending marijuana prohibition can do, Alaskan voters fail to continue moving our nation in the direction toward freedom and fairness. There's no doubt that will impact every other state, national and international marijuana reform effort. Americans with common sense don't want that.

Help us to keep that from becoming a reality.

Pretty ballsy move considering she probably spent much time in education and money to be a journalist. Rest assure Ms. Greene will never ever be a reporter again, or maybe better yet, the magazine "High Times" may be in the need of a qualified reporter, either way, Ms. Greene deserves a atta girl for standing for her convictions, whether these convictions - to blaze or not - be right or wrong.

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Editor-In-Chief

Roger West

WHAT CBS DIDN'T ASK

Cross-posted from thinkprogress:

John Miller, reporting for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” found himself the target of ridicule on social media for his Sunday “exposé” on the National Security Agency (NSA). The segment, which takes viewers through some portions of the NSA building, has been characterized as puff piece with Miller soft-balling questions to Gen. Keith Alexander, the agency’s director and head of the U.S. Cyber Command, and NSA Analyst Stephen Benitez. Here are four questions Miller, a former U.S. Department of National Intelligence employee who reportedly is preparing to join the New York Police Department, missed or didn’t press hard enough to get answered:

Why did Alexander and National Intelligence Director James Clapper tell Congress that NSA wasn’t collecting U.S. citizens’ personal data when it really was?

In a March hearing, Clapper told Congress that no data was “wittingly” collected, according to a letter he sent in June to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Alexander was quoted in the letter as saying, “The story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.” During the interview with Miller, he conceded the NSA was collecting some data, arguing, “How do you know when the bad guy who’s using those same communications that my daughters use, is in the United States trying to do something bad?”

Why were employees using NSA tactics to spy on their love interests?

“Nobody [in the NSA] willfully or knowingly trying to break the law,” Alexander said. Miller did point out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court thought differently, saying “the NSA systematically transgressed both its own court-appointed limits in bulk Internet data collection programs.” But he didn’t bring up that NSA employees have admittedly abused their access in the past. Most notably, many employees used the NSA’s databases to gather intelligence on significant others and exes, violations known under the spycraft label LOVEINT. There was also no mention of the nearly 3,000 incidents of unauthorized data collection by NSA employees discovered over the course of internal investigations, which The Washington Post first reported.

What can the NSA get from spying on Google and Yahoo that it can’t get directly?

Miller acknowledged the agency openly cooperates with the two Internet giants, Apple and others to access user information. However, the NSA still infiltrated Google and Yahoo’s data centers per documents released by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Alexander dodged a similar question when Miller asked if the NSA hacked into U.S. Internet companies’ foreign data centers: “No, that’s not correct,” Alexander said. “We do target terrorist communications. And terrorists use communications from Google, from Yahoo, and from other service providers. So our objective is to collect those communications no matter where they are.” Alexander’s comments echoed those of his predecessor, Michael Hayden, but still didn’t address the need to gather information secretly from companies they work with. Since the revelation, Google, Yahoo and six other tech companies have asked the NSA to revise their agreements after Snowden documents revealed the agency spied on ‘World of Warcraft’ video game users.

Does the NSA ever track people’s cell phone call locations and to what extent?

Miller and Alexander discussed phone monitoring, with Alexander skirting the issue saying, “We’re defending this country from future terrorist attacks and we’re defending our civil liberties and privacy. There’s no reason that we would listen to the phone calls of Americans. There’s no intelligence value in that. There’s no reason that we’d want to read their email. There is no intelligence value in that.” Miller’s narration goes on to say that the NSA only collects “metadata” of phone records for more than 300 million Americans that reveal the number from which a call originated and the one receiving the call. That metadata can also include information about where the call was placed, using GPS technology that most phones have these days. Numerous reports have surfaced on how the NSA uses cell phone tracking data, and that it collects billions of such records world wide each day. But geolocation tracking never came up.

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