Tag: Conspiracy

Bizarre attempts emerge to spin Biden Afghanistan disaster as being Trumps fault

It is a political tradition to blame the previous party in charge for current negatives and rob them of the credit for the work they did that spring positives under their oppositions term in power. It’s the same result as taking credit for the enjoyable shade or fruits of a tree that the team you are against planted years ago, but blaming that other team for having planted the tree when you chop it down with lazy or improper accounting for physics and its fall damages property.

Barack Obama was so good at this that he not only took credit for and was able to spin-as-a-good-thing policies he was elected explicitly to advocate against when he was a candidate like extending the Bush tax cuts, legally legitimizing and then expanding the Bush spying apparatus, dramatically expanding the Bush war efforts, and the flipping his policy on what would later be embraced as being called “Obamacare” – but he also took credit for things he actively opposed while in office but turned out well despite his efforts, such as promising that Obamacare was legal and would have no taxes but when the Supreme Court ruled that it was expressly illegal and unconstitutional unless it was considered as a tax, or when he tried to block oil drilling – failed – and then took credit for the resulting oil boom that he had opposed saying “that was me, people“. lol.

Joe Biden is not as talented. and his supporters are forced to make goofy stretches to attempt to blame Donald Trump for the Biden blunders happening in his first year in office. The highest profile disaster so far has been the Biden “cut and run” withdrawal from Afghanistan that handed over total control of the country to the supposedly evil-terrorist leaders we had been fighting for 20 years, left Americans stranded, left military dogs abandoned to die, and left billions worth of tanks and airstrike vehicles and guns and ammo for the new rulers to use against their people.

The typical stretch to blame Trump for all this has been that Trump is the one who set the 2021 withdrawal date from the country, “so there!”. This ignores the reality that Biden scrapped the Trump withdrawal date, all the negotiations and terms that went with it, and didn’t follow any of the Trump administrations guidelines for a tiered withdrawal plan that would have at least made an attempt to avert the obvious disasters mentioned above.

The newest theory from someone named Cheri Jacobus, a NeverTrump activist and Russiagate Hoax podcast producer is that Trump set a “booby trap” for Biden with that Afghanistan policy, that, er… Biden ignored and revamped and made his own and did not have to follow at all or in any of the ways that he did.

In case you missed it: Jacobus lists Trump and Mike Pompeo as being “enemies of America” along with Vladimir Putin in her baseless accusation that Biden’s horrifically mismanaged Afghanistan withdrawal actions were somehow a Trump/Russia collusion “trap”. No argument or explanation for the wild conspiracy theory, of course; she just tosses it out there to keep gullible minds connecting bad Biden moves to etherial Trump/Russia puppetry.

Sure, lady…

But the purpose is highlighting this insanity is to remind how thorough the Russiagate hoax peddlers continue to attempt to use this excuse, years after the Trump/Russia Collision conspiracy theory was investigated and debunked.

Last year, weeks before election day, Jen Psaki and Politico columnist Natasha Betrand helped spread the total lie that Russia was somehow behind tricking Americans in some way about the incriminating details found on Joe Biden’s son’s laptop.

The laptop was later verified to indeed have been Hunter Biden’s and it was revealed that the whole time Democrats and supposed “former intel officials” were claiming that its contents were Russian disinfo, Federal prosecutors had in fact been secretly investigating Hunter Biden for exactly the crimes he is shown admitting to and talking about (particularly international money laundering) in the contents of the laptop. But by then it was too late: Joe Biden had won the election, Hunter Biden received no punishment or prosecution, and Jen Psaki was hired as the Biden White House Press Secretary.

Tinkering with the Electoral College to…help Republicans?

Pennsylvania Republicans are working on a plan that’s as mischievous as it is completely legitimate: apportioning its electoral votes by congressional district instead of the current winner-take-all system. Under the new system, a presidential candidate would receive an electoral vote for each congressional district he or she (but let’s be honest — this year, it’s going to once again be a he) wins, plus two more if he wins the statewide vote count. For example, since John McCain won ten out of Pennsylvania’s 19 districts in 2008, he would receive 10 electoral votes, instead of the zero he took home under the state’s current system. Obama would have received 11 electoral votes — 9 for the congressional district he won, plus two for winning the state — instead of the 21 he was awarded.

Pennsylvania, like every other state, is free to dole out its electoral votes however it wants. Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature as well as the governorship, so if the GOP wants to switch over to a congressional-district apportionment system, all the Democrats can really do is whine.

Interesting push that I didn’t totally understand at first, and still don’t unless this is a conspiracy, which I will get to in a moment. The part that doesn’t make sense is that even though PA has been won by the Democrats in the past 5 elections, the Republicans have campaigned there every time with legitimate hopes to capture it. In theory it is a “swing state” because the margin of victory is thin enough to change over, it just never happens that way. So if the Republicans think they could actually swing the state to their direction, why would they want to change the winner-take-all rule RIGHT when it could benefit them? Further: the extra few electoral votes under this system wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any of the recent elections, so whats to be gained by Republicans by doing this?

That’s when the conspiracy comes in: What if other states that have gone Democrat in presidential elections for the past few rounds but are now controlled by Republican Governors and Republican state congresses did the same thing? Such states are Michigan and Wisconsin, which dont have many Republican voting districts but if the trend continues – who knows?

Below is the electoral map based on Congressional-district apportionment (Red = Republican. Blue = Democrat).

As for Democrats retaliating by doing the same in traditionally Republican voting states? Not so much…

The only states that John McCain won where Dems control both houses of the state legislature are Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia. West Virginia is too small for splitting the electoral votes to have much effect, and Mississippi has a Republican governor. That leaves Arkansas, another small state — and one where McCain won every district handily in 2008.

No matter how you slice it, splitting up according to districts helps Republicans since Democrat districts are more solid-democrat than Republican districts are solid-republican. I know this from living and traveling across the country: there are far more areas where you can bet large amounts of money on picking a person at random at knowing for certain they will lean Democrat and hardly anywhere in the country where the same is true for Republicans. Even the most conservative areas of a fiery red state still has plenty of democrat influence. As Michael Barone of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote last year:

[I]n 2004 John Kerry won 80% or more of the vote in 19 congressional districts, while the number of congressional districts in which George W. Bush won 80% or more was zero. Similarly and even more starkly, in 2008 Barack Obama won 80% or more of the vote in 28 congressional districts, while the number of congressional districts in which John McCain won 80% or more was zero.

Normally I am not one for conspiracies but this one just might be hatching… Stay tuned…

Birth Certificate Apologies

Now that President Obama has released his birth certificate, I demand apologies from the people on both sides who spread lies, intentional or otherwise. APOLOGIZE…

FROM ANTI-BIRTHERS: You were wrong. The stock response to anyone who dared to mention the fact that the birth certificate had until now remained hidden, was a false claim that “he [President Obama] HAS [released it]”. Even when anti-birthers like myself would observe that the document released was in fact not a birth certificate and did not prove anything on this issue in the context of still mentioning that the conspiracy theory is ridiculous and wholly without merit – you people still smeared us as being birther-nuts and kept falsely saying the birth certificate was already released. You were wrong. It was just now released. Apologize. It is not okay to spread lies just because the other side is peddling a theory based on lies. You fight lies with TRUTH. not more lies. APOLOGIZE.

FROM BIRTHERS: You were wrong. I’m not going to waste time in dissecting exactly why it is insanely stupid to hold the belief that Barack Obama’s mother who was living in Hawaii whilst pregnant, flew via 1960s air travel all the way to Kenya to have her baby and for some reason have someone plant a false newspaper birth announcement back in her Hawaiian hometown newspaper (and for what gain or motive?). Instead lets just stick to the obvious: you said the birth certificate would show he was born in Africa. here it is… it doesn’t say that. You were wrong. APOLOGIZE.

Top birther Jerome Corsi’s book will be released on May 17, 2011 (this is not a joke):

You were wrong. You invested a lot of money into something you will not get back unless you continue to scam people with claims that “the book is more relevant now, than ever”. Don’t do that. Escape with a shred of dignity and admit you were wrong and eat the losses on the book.

APOLOGIZE….

Equally annoying are the people who drove this as a news story, almost entirely for partisan reasons. MSNBC covered it extensively with full segments, back to back while I never saw anything about it on Fox except in single question form by a host or comment by guest to dismiss how dumb it is. Still though, it wasn’t that big a deal in relation to everything else across the board anywhere. Contrary to the Presidents claim, the Birther controversy was 4% of newshole, not ‘dominant’ story.

An analysis of cable news coverage shows that 19 percent of the cable news airtime studied focused on the 2012 election last week. Mark Jurkowitz, Associate Director of PEJ, provides this breakdown of the coverage by cable network:

MSNBC
including “The Ed Show,” “Hardball,” “The Last Word,” and “The Rachel Maddow Show”

  • 28% of airtime studied was devoted to the 2012 election
  • 10% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 92% of the Obama coverage


Fox
including “Special Report w/Bret Baier,” “Fox Report w/Shepard Smith,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity”

  • 16% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
  • 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 8% of the Obama coverage


CNN
including “The Situation Room,” “John King, USA,” “In The Arena,” and “Anderson Cooper 360?

  • 11% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
  • 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
  • A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 100% of the Obama coverage.

Jurkowitz says MSNBC consistently devotes more of its airtime to politics, based on PEJ’s research, while CNN generally spends the least amount of time on politics of the three cable networks.

While MSNBC’s coverage may have been devoted to questioning or debunking the president’s citizenship issues, that network spent the most time discussing it.

Donald Trumps reaction was to tell everyone “you’re welcome”, taking full credit for the release. This is…valid. His headline making on the issue indeed is probably what changed it from a useful tool for the Administration to use to make Republicans look like crazy morons into an actual detriment that they needed to clean up before it made them look worse. Still though: he has to cop to the fact that his hunch was wrong, his “research project in Hawaii” never actually existed, and just on the plain old facts, he lost on this. Admit it already…

Stephen King Shot John Lennon according to the internet

I heard some nut drop this website name on Michael Medved’s show Howard-Stern-bobba-booey style twice so I checked it out. It looks boring and lame and I didn’t have the patience for it.

Basically, it says Stephen King killed John Lennon.

If you care more than I do, you’re welcome to go to Lennon Murder Truth and summarize it for me…

Steve Lightfoot is a cool name though.