Republicans Hosting Fake News Sites. It's Legal, They Insist!

Rep. Trey Gowdy (White Guy, S.C.) getting ready to make shit up
about Benghazi. Hmm, par for the course...

We should be nicer to Republicans, I know, but the GOP silly season is in full bloom with fake news sites:

These two dozen sites, with names such as “North County Update” and “Central Valley Update” look like political fact-checking sites; the NRCC’s spokeswoman, Andrea Bozek, called it “a new and effective way to disseminate information.”

An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find “Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee” in small print. “They’re not fake Web sites,” the official said. “These are real attack Web sites.”

Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP’s scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.

Well, then, as long as it's legal.

Lindsey Graham and John McCain Should Shut the ?%#! Up. (Et tu, Hillary?)

Now, come on, John feels bad enough as it is about that photo op in Syria with ISIS!

Lindsey Graham says unless Barack Obama does more in the Middle East, they're going to come here and get us!

John McCain says that Barack Obama made a terrible mistake by not staying in Iraq in the first place -- even though the pullout date had been negotiated by Bush well before Obama took office.

Yeah, there was that deal about a failure to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement, but that was doomed from the start. Graham and McCain, of all people, know why.

Now Hillary gets into the act and criticizes Obama for not doing more in Syria, and we all know why: She has to get out in front as a "chick with balls." Pols gotta pol, I guess. Sheesh.

No comment on Graham. When he speaks, I hear something like "Obama's feckless policy toward toilet-bowl cleaners has left us vulnerable to shitty toilets!"

As for McCain, his I'm-very-serious-on-foreign-policy hard stares are empty. He's a bomb-bomb-bomber and contributes nothing of substance except slightly more hot air than his colleagues. His credibility fell apart completely since he met with ISIS leaders in Syria a while back and said they'd be cool guys to arm against Assad. Oops.

Now, as for Hillary, her whole point is "we could have found the good guys and armed them, but we didn't." Okay, in Syria (or Libya, or Egypt, or Iran, or Lebanon, or Qatar, or Bahrain, or Yemen, or Somalia, or you-pick-one) EXACTLY WHO ARE THE GOOD GUYS AND WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU'LL GUESS BETTER THAN MCCAIN?

The whole good guy with a gun thing doesn't work very well here at home, but over there where they all basically hate us it's gonna work out swell! Because after we arm good guys, the guns will never fall into the hands of the bad guys. Never!

Hillary has to walk a fine line. Well, maybe not. Next to her,
Rand Paul looks like a foreign-policy wimp.

Gaza Is a Tragedy Because of Hamas

Who wants peace? Apparently not Hamas.

The violence and death in the Gaza Strip is sickening. The more I read, though, the more I find that Hamas lives off this violence. It's easy to demonize the Israelis -- they often seem to not help their case, internationally -- but how culpable are they? It's complicated, but this piece by Dennis Ross, who knows the region and its history firsthand, lays the blame where it falls, and that's on Hamas:

Unfortunately, we know the path Hamas chose. Even as Israel was completing the process of withdrawing all its settlers and soldiers from Gaza, Hamas carried out a bus-station bombing in Israel. Then, from late 2005 to early 2006, Hamas conducted multiple attacks on the very crossing points that allowed people and goods to move into and out of Gaza. For Hamas, it was more important to continue “resistance” than to allow Gazans to constructively test their new freedom — or to give Israelis a reason to think that withdrawal could work. Some argue that Israel withdrew but imposed a siege on Gaza. In reality, Hamas produced the siege. Israel’s tight embargo on Gaza came only after ongoing Hamas attacks.

The embargo on Gaza might have hurt the Palestinians who live there, but it did not stop Hamas from building a labyrinth of underground tunnels, bunkers, command posts and shelters for its leaders, fighters and rockets. The tunnels are under houses, schools, hospitals and mosques; they allow Hamas fighters to go down one shaft and depart from another. According to the Israeli army, an estimated 600,000 tons of cement — some of it smuggled through tunnels from Egypt, some diverted from construction materials allowed into Gaza — was used for Hamas’s underground network.

Israel offered peace, and Hamas rejected it. That rejection continues today. Until Hamas -- or the Palestinians as a whole -- accept peace as an answer, then war is what they will get. It's not easy sympathizing with the Israelis as images of children being pulled from the rubble dominate the news. But who keeps violating the truces, who keeps rejecting each new peace offer? Hamas.

This nightmare ends when Hamas says it ends or, more likely, when Hamas is no more. Until then, it's slow-rolling war with all its consequences.

It's hard to like Bibi, but Israel has the leadership Hamas requires it to have.

Does Obama Already Have the Power to Grant Broad (Temporary) Amnesty?

Many think so, and it's well summarized by TPM's Sahil Kapur.

Holy Euphemism, Batman! Torture IS Torture.

You're right, Robin. Cowardice does, ahem, blow.

I'm glad that the New York Times has finally decided, officially, to call torture torture. Its tortured logic -- we are here to report, not to judge -- was embarrassingly limp. I love how new Editor Dean Baquet described the change as driven by reporters, who asked that the paper "recalibrate its language."

The truth is, like many mainstream outlets, the Times was guilty of abject cowardice, pure and simple. I grant that they may have been intimidated by the Bush administration. It wasn't for the first time, but for the "Paper of Record," let the record show their cowardice.

About five years back, I heard the NPR ombudsman, Alicia C. Sheperd, declare on air that she was advising all NPR reporters to refrain from using the word torture but instead use the terms enhanced or harsh interrogation techniques, declaring it was not the reporters' job to use "loaded" words.

I will not waste my time quoting Alicia C. Shepard, and for all I know my beef is not with her but with the editors above her who urged her to adopt her position. But I do urge you to read the following two articles she wrote on the subject. Here is her defense and here is her defense of her defense. Read the comments following the articles to get the sense of the public response, which is, needless to say, not kind to her.

From the moment I heard Ms. Shepard lay down the official NPR position on not using the word torture, I, a twenty-year-long annual contributor to NPR/PBS, stopped contributing. I haven't given them a penny since. A friend of mine recently chided me for it, since I listen to NPR and watch PBS daily. It was food for thought, and I was considering contributing again. This change of heart announced by the New York Times has angered me anew.

If and when I can find evidence that NPR has also changed its views, I may consider contributing again, that is unless they are spineless or obfuscating in the way they announce their policy shift. If it's recalibrating their language, I'll spend my NPR contribution on pizza and beer, thank you very much.

Note. I found this in Shepard's entry in Wikipedia:

In June 2009, Shepard, acting in the capacity of NPR Ombudsman, deflected objections to NPR's use of euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogations" as a replacement for the word "torture" in their reporting about waterboarding, stating: "No matter how many distinguished groups — the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners — say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security. One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views, which are shared by a portion of the American public. So, it is not an open-and-shut case that everyone believes waterboarding to be torture."
Shepard herself stated that she personally believed waterboarding was torture in an interview with Bob Garfield of On the Media.

What is detestable about her statement is that the Red Cross or the U.N. might believe what Bush and Cheney did was torture, but because Bush and Cheney disagree, hey, views differ! So, what's an ethical reporter going to do??

BTW, her supporting her argument with "[their views] are shared by a portion of the American public" is crap. Should NPR refer to Barack Obama as "purportedly American" or speak of evolution as "a wildly controversial theory?" Sheesh.

Final tragic note. Sheperd taught media ethics at Georgetown during the years she was NPR ombudsman. Teaching by example! George Orwell would have been proud.

Final silly but true note. Shepard said NPR Managing Editor David Sweeney made her do it! All right then, bygones!

Here's professor Shepard teaching her kids that sometimes media
ethics means you have to help your government cover up torture.

After quite a search, I can't find that NPR has changed its policy toward (the word) torture since Shepard's pronouncements. Shameful.

On the Education Grift (Good Money!)

Campbell Brown: Well, she looks all educationy!

Charles P. Pierce asks the question, "Who the fuck is Campbell Brown?" How is she an education expert?

Let's let Charles answer this one (not pretty, despite how pretty Cammy is!):

Quite simply, Campbell Brown is not in this for the kids. She's running a con on behalf of some pretty shady people. (Singer, for one, has a disreputable history of looting entire impoverished countries for his own benefit.) Because of this, she doesn't really have to know what the fck she's talking about, which is good, because she pretty plainly doesn't.

Charlie not happy with Cammy's con, no he isn't. Read on.

Sorry Michelle Rhee, there's a new griftin' girl in town...

WaPo Editorial Board: Because Congress Can Do Nothing, Obama Should Do Nothing

WaPo: Congress won't help these refugees, so, Obama, don't you either.

Because why? Because we -- editorial board, or Fred Hiatt, whichever comes first -- don't know why. Or, if we do know why, we aren't telling because then you'd know why. It's better to just say don't be bad, Obama, because maybe a Republican president woulda coulda will do something you don't like, and then what the fuck? Liberals, don't do it because Fred Hiatt says no because must be unconstitutional but too lazy to explain why. Just don't Obama!

WaPo Editorial Board = idiots at play in an editorial field of dreams. But oh well, it's only the paper of record in our nation's capital. We're doomed. Oh, and read the comments on this Mobius strip of illogic, but bring the Pepto.