The first press briefing by the new White House spokes person was bizarre and devoid of facts as the least popular administration in history lurched through it's first full day in office.
Despite calls from the lame duck Obama administration for “review” and “discussion” the construction of the oil pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners continues at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. The brutality against protestor including rubber bullets, fire hoses in sub freezing weather and torture of prisoners also continues.
Given a few decades even Neo-Nazis can learn branding. Just as Trump has re-branded himself from Howard Stern's whipping boy to Twit-in-chief (tweeter-in-chief?) of the United States, the Neo-Nazi movement has re-branded itself as the “Alt-Right.” This makes their younger followers feel more hip than having to affect a 1920s clothing line or dancing around in their mother's curtains. Fascism in all countries has always sloppily combined an imagined mythic past with visions of an imagined mythic future while parroting endless lies about the present.
The Washington Post announced it. The wire services ran with it. The Intercept failed the Washington Post on journalism 101. Newsweek tried to salvage the story. The fine details also give another drop of proof that a major news allegation that has been hyped for months is completely without merit. In short, the the claim that Russians had nefarious plan to hack the power grid of Vermont is false. The Mockingbird has checked under both Ben and Jerry's beds, and we found no bears, fancy, cozy or otherwise.
The idea that Russian security services hacked the Democratic National Committee's emails and released them to Wikileaks in order to cause the election of Donald Trump has bounced off the walls of the beltway's echo chamber so many times it is as deafening as one would imagine the four trumpets in the book o
Still reeling rightward from their unexpected electoral college defeat, the Democratic Party leadership still struggles to find some force to blame other than their own candidates, positions and tepid token defense of the status quo. After searching the internet for the worst clickbait ever to call fake news (The fifth thing on their list will amaze you) they first enlisted the tech titans of Menlo Park to aid them in the first phase of their broad censorship initiative.
The battle to launch a recounts in three states by the Green Party lead by Jill Stein heated up today with a switch of court venues from state to federal court in Pennsylvania. President elect Trump was again sighted on twitter without adult supervision to call Stein a “Fraud.” The real focus of the recount effort may be better placed in Wisconsin.
A very small sector of the media seems concerned about “fake news.” There seems to be little unified definition of it. The center right wing of the Democratic Party has taken up the banner of “fake news” as somehow being responsible for their narrow loss an election with the lowest voter turnout in two decades. A couple of days before Thanksgiving, while most of America was cooking and preparing to shop the Tech Titans of Silicon Valley began to implement their drive for outright censorship with Facebook leading the way.
On Wednesday Jill Stein successfully engaged the Wisconsin board of elections in a recount. The Green Party managed to raise the necessary funds to pay for this effort and have raised a total of $5.2 million so far to include Pennsylvania and Michigan. This is despite attacks from Donald Trump as well as liberal elements of the media.
As the leaks from Hillary Clinton's circle mounted, there was a rush to blame the Russians. Putin likes Trump, therefore Russian spies must have carried out the hacks that lead to the DNC leaks, Clinton Email Leaks and the Podesta Files all in the span of a few short months. Those files, released on Wikileaks, follow a lower profile leak that happened withing the Clinton Foundation in 2015 to the mainstream press and that leak was from a suspected insider. It is clear from the Podesta files that Clinton's inner circle had a short list of suspects that were already being watched.