Newsmax next to back down under legal threat

After the right wing echo chamber broadcast and amplified Trump’s wild claims of election fraud by the Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, they were threatened with legal action. Smartmatic posted on their website the basis of their complaint.

According to Smartmatic’s demand letters, these organizations could have easily discovered the falsity of the statements and implications made about Smartmatic by investigating their statements before publishing them to millions of viewers and readers. Smartmatic had nothing to do with the “controversies” that certain public and private figures have alleged regarding the 2020 U.S. election.  Multiple fact-checkers have consistently debunked these false statements with stunning consistency and regularity. 
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Trump pardons killers of people of color

Yesterday, Donald Trump pardoned a lot of people and you can be sure that there will be more to come before he is kicked out of the White House.The list of pardon beneficiaries include the usual cronies and politicians. But the ones that really stick in the craw are the pardons of people who killed civilians and were tried and convicted of their offenses.

The four Blackwater guards — Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard — were convicted by a federal jury in 2014 after a lengthy trial that saw some 30 witnesses travel from Iraq to testify against them. Prosecutors accused the men of illegally unleashing “powerful sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers on innocent men, women and children.”

According to prosecutors, the four were among seven Blackwater employees who opened fire in the Nusoor Square traffic circle in Baghdad, killing 17 people.

An FBI investigation found 14 of the deaths unjustified, according to rules of engagement for private security contractors in Iraq. Slatten was accused of firing the first shots.

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What will happen on January 6th

Now that 12 Trump cult members of the House of Representatives seem to have decided to oppose the acceptance of at least some of the electoral votes that gave the win in the Electoral college to Joe Biden, attention has shifted to what might happen on January 6th, the day that a joint session of Congress meets to finalize the election results. Objections on this day are not rare. They happened in 2001, 2005, and 2007. But they have never succeeded.

Here is what will happen, according to the Congressional Research Service, when the joint session of Congress meets “for the purpose of opening the 2020 presidential election electoral votes submitted by state government officials, certifying their validity, counting them, and declaring the official result of the election for President and Vice President.”
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Et tu, Pat?

It looks like Jesus has let Pat Robertson down. After promising his viewers that Jesus would ride in to save the day before the Electoral College meets, saying “this fraud will not stand and it will be exposed and that the lord himself will intervene before this country turns into something socialist”, he now says that it is all over and that Trump should concede the election. Worse, he says that Trump “lives in an alternate reality”, is “very erratic”, and that he has had his day and that it is time to “move on”. Being told by Pat Robertson of all people that you are living in an alternate reality has got to hurt.
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Trump may end Pentagon support for CIA covert operations

I read with interest this report that Trump may end the Pentagon’s cooperation with the CIA in the latter’s covert operations.

Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight.
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It’s official: We are a nation of idiots

A group of massless people invaded a Target store and marched through it shouting “Freedom!” and “This is America!” and also, inexplicably,”Library Card!” (At least, that is what that last one sounded like.)

I can understand a person feeling, however wrongly, that wearing a mask is an infringement of their rights. But to care so much about it that they go out and recruit other people to engage in such an absurd stunt is to display idiocy of a high order

Can we all agree that the very lowest priority for getting the vaccines should be people like those in the Target store who are deliberately flouting the guidelines and needlessly putting other people at risk just to make a silly political point?

Seth Meyers makes the case for others who should be on the bottom of the list.

Under threat of lawsuit, Fox News backs away from some fraud claims

Fox News has felt free to parrot Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud and have even added to the charges and named companies that they claim colluded in it. Finally one outfit called Smartmatic got fed up and threatened to sue it and all the other right-wing news outlets for making false and defamatory claims.

Under that threat, three of their main shows that had been promoting these ideas, hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, went into damage control and tried to walk back their claims. But the three did it in a strange way, by showing the identical pre-taped item.
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Trump’s incompetence helped speed up vaccine approval

After the expected spike in covid-19 cases and deaths about two weeks after Thanksgiving, the rates have started dropping again, although they are still high. We will now have to brace ourselves for another spike about two weeks after Christmas when some people will violate the guidelines once again to visit with family and friends.

The incompetence of the Trump administration in its handling of the pandemic has been responsible for the massive numbers of infected people and deaths in the US. In terms of total numbers (though not per capita), the US easily leads the rest of the world with over 18 million confirmed cases and about 325,000 deaths. Currently those numbers are rising at an average daily rate of about 200,000 and 2,500 respectively. Those numbers could been much lower if from the beginning Trump had been urging everyone to adopt the common sense safety guidelines that scientists and public health experts were advocating, instead of mocking them and hosting events that openly violated them and dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic.
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But what’s the square footage of the assembly instructions?

Anyone who has tried to assemble IKEA furniture has stories to tell about trying to figure out the purely diagrammatic instructions and understanding what goes where and what to do when parts are left over.

But now the company has entered the tiny home market, selling a 187 sq. ft. home for around $50,000.

It is not clear if the home has to be assembled by the buyer.

Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell is back?

After Sidney Powell was fired as a lawyer for the Trump campaign after making all manner of wild conspiracy theories about how the CIA and Hugo Chavez had worked with Dominion Voting Systems machines to swing the election against Trump, one could be forgiven for thinking that her 15 minutes of fame were over. But no.

She is back in the limelight for two reasons. One is that Dominion is threatening legal action against her unless she withdraws the allegations made against the company that they claim has damaged its reputation and resulted in its employees being threatened.
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