Cop Watch

Native American activst Nathan Phillips was involved in a similar incident in 2015 where he targeted a group of mostly white frat boys. Phillips then ran to reporters and claimed he was abused after HE CONFRONTED the college kids. The “racist” incident made the news. Phillips ran to police after he confronted the university students holding a party. He made the news. FOX 2 reported: An Ypsilanti man says he was trying to teach a few students dressed in American Indian theme party about respecting Native Americans. Not long afterward, Nathan Phillips said that an interaction with party-goers and students turned ugly. Nathan Phillips says he was out for a noon walk on a Saturday in mid-April. He walked by a home where he saw Eastern Michigan University students dressed as Native Americans. “They had little feathers on, I was just going to walk by,” Phillips said. “A group of them said ‘Come on over, come here.'” He says he walked over to the fence and saw roughly 30 to 40 students involved in a theme party. “They had their face painted,” Phillips said. “I said what the heck is going on here. ‘Oh we are honoring you.’ I said no you are not honoring me.” It was a statement he says they took offense to. “Then started whooping and hollering,” he said. “I said that wasn’t honoring, that was racist. Then at that time, it really got ugly.” Phillips says he was bombarded with racial slurs. “(They said) ‘Go back to the reservation, you blank indian,'” he said. One student, he says, threw a beer can at him. “If I would have stayed where I was at, it would have hit me in the head,” he said. “I backed up and it hit me in the chest.” He had seen enough at that point and says he called the police. “By the time police got there, it was like there was no party there at all,” he said. Phillips filed a report with campus police who tell FOX 2 they are investigating the matter.

The part with the Indian and the kids starts shortly after 1:10, and if you watch for 20 minutes or so, you'll see Mr. Benyamyan shouting quite a number of racist and homophobic slurs at the kids. I will confess that I fast forwarded through the first hour of the film, so I'm making no claims on what occurred during that part, so if there's something earth shattering that I missed please tell me, but I've been investigating this for a couple of hours today and I've seen no references to anything. So there you have it. A perfect case of exactly how the media manipulates a story to push a preferred narrative. The conclusions I've presented here are my own, based upon the available evidence which I've presented above, feel free to draw your own. If you have a compelling counter argument (with evidence), please present it below. There's a lot more information available out there, particularly on Twitter (like statements from the students themselves and a (predictable) knee-jerk condemnation of the kids from the Diocese of Covington ), go see for yourself. Never, ever, ever believe what the media tells you to believe without checking into it personally.

“More Americans say Trump’s economic policies have made conditions better (40 percent) than worse (28 percent), while 29 percent say they have not had much of an effect,” said the survey. “In January 2011, a comparable point in Barack Obama’s presidency, the public expressed mixed views of the impact of his economic policies, with about as many saying his policies made things worse (31 percent) as better (28 percent),” added the Pew analysis.

There are reasons to believe there’s something to the story too, though, starting with the high stakes I mentioned above. Leopold, Cormier, and BuzzFeed’s editors are obviously keenly aware of the magnitude of the charge here. They’re accusing a sitting president of a crime that makes his removal from office conceivable, even with a Republican majority in the Senate. They also must be aware that we’ll know whether they were right or wrong sooner rather than later. This charge won’t hang out there forever unresolved, like Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague per the Steele dossier. Mueller’s working on his report, it may be ready as soon as next month, and this claim — if true — will be a key part of it. If the report emerges and there’s nothing in there about suborning perjury, BuzzFeed’s reputation will never recover. This isn’t a case like the dossier where they’re publishing someone else’s work product with no claims as to its veracity. They’re putting their own names to it. Every political scoop they publish for the next 20 years will be challenged by citing to the Leopold/Cormier fiasco. It’s basically professional suicide unless they really do have good reason to be confident in the reporting.

The purposes of having U.S. forces in Syria include preventing ISIS from reestablishing domination over territory; protecting our Kurdish allies, who fought alongside our forces against ISIS, from being massacred by Turkish forces; and blocking Iranian ambitions. They do not include guaranteeing that ISIS never succeeds in a suicide bombing. What I found noteworthy in the Post’s article is this tidbit: “The four deaths doubled the total number of U.S. personnel killed by hostile fire in Syria since the deployment there began just over three years ago.” In other words, our military engagement in Syria has led to only eight American deaths in three years, and four of them occurred after Trump announced we are leaving. The engagement is costing money, of course, but the case for withdrawal cannot plausibly rest on loss of American lives.

-- A GROUP OF HOUSE DEMOCRATIC FRESHMEN marched outside in the cold, to the Senate on Tuesday to confront SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL in his Russell office. The only thing is he doesn’t work in that office. They quickly switched to go to his Capitol office. When they got to the Senate side of the building, they left McConnell’s office, almost went to the Senate floor, but then quickly pivoted back to the House side of the building. If they wanted, they could’ve waited on the floor for him, since they have those privileges.

ZAK Honey, what is it, is everything OK? JESSICA It’s… It’s… ZAK Don’t worry about the Whole Foods delivery. It came just after you left. The chia seeds, flax seeds, pea protein, dried goji berries, resistant potato starch, turmeric powder, and collagen hydrolysate were all in there. They even remembered the coconut oil this time! JESSICA No it’s not that. ZAK What is it? JESSICA It’s Trump… Did you see what he did this time? ZAK The Big Macs? JESSICA begins to ‘literally shake’. Her yoga mat falls to the floor and unfurls. JESSICA Not just the Big Macs… He put packets of Hot Mustard sauce in the Eleanor Roosevelt silver servewear… Zak, I – I don’t think… ZAK pushes back on his chair and slowly runs both hands through his hair. He gets up and hugs JESSICA. ZAK It’s going to be fine baby. Just remember your breathing exercises, OK? Alternate nostril breathing, just like you were doing this morning, OK? JESSICA begins to weep.

“I get asked that by attorneys, lawyers, all the time: if you just gave your ID, you would’ve been fine,” Roth said. “But again, the point behind what we’re doing is, regardless if it’s suspicious, regardless if it’s odd or different, it’s because we’re exercising our freedoms. We do it because we simply don’t have to give it.”

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history 10-Jan-12 44-55

According to The Daily Signal, “Last year, it was reported that Congress has secretly paid out over $17 million to settle close to 300 cases by staffers claiming sexual and other forms of harassment and discrimination.” If prosecutors failed to pursue charges relating to each of these individual claims and payments (normally these are made in secret and the identities of the parties are withheld unless suit is filed), would they be applying the law arbitrarily and unfairly?

Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/#1dff244e7ad5 On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.” Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts. The original article was posted online on the Washington Post's website at 7:55PM EST. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we can see that sometime between 9:24PM and 10:06PM the Post updated the article to indicate that multiple computer systems at the utility had been breached ("computers" plural), but that further data was still being collected: “Officials said that it is unclear when the code entered the Vermont utility’s computers, and that an investigation will attempt to determine the timing and nature of the intrusion.” Several paragraphs of additional material were added between 8PM and 10PM, claiming and contextualizing the breach as part of a broader campaign of Russian hacking against the US, including the DNC and Podesta email breaches. Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior. Yet, as the Post’s story ricocheted through the politically charged environment, other media outlets and technology experts began questioning the Post’s claims and the utility company itself finally issued a formal statement at 9:37PM EST, just an hour and a half after the Post's publication, pushing back on the Post’s claims: “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding.”

Washington Post Appends "Russian Propaganda Fake News" Story, Admits It May Be Fake https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-07/washington-post-apends-russian-propaganda-story-admits-it-may-be-fake In the latest example why the "mainstream media" is facing a historic crisis of confidence among its readership, facing unprecedented blowback following Craig Timberg November 24 Washington Post story "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say", on Wednesday a lengthy editor's note appeared on top of the original article in which the editor not only distances the WaPo from the "experts" quoted in the original article whose "work" served as the basis for the entire article (and which became the most read WaPo story the day it was published) but also admits the Post could not "vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's finding regarding any individual media outlet", in effect admitting the entire story may have been, drumroll "fake news" and conceding the Bezos-owned publication may have engaged in defamation by smearing numerous websites - Zero Hedge included - with patently false and unsubstantiated allegations. It was the closest the Washington Post would come to formally retracting the story, which has now been thoroughly discredited not only by outside commentators, but by its own editor. The apended note in question: Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list. As The Washingtonian notes, the implicit concession follows intense and rising criticism of the article over the past two weeks. It was “rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations,” Intercept reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton wrote, noting that PropOrNot, one of the groups whose research was cited in Timberg’s piece, “anonymous cowards.” One of the sites PropOrNot cited as Russian-influenced was the Drudge Report. The piece’s description of some sharers of bogus news as “useful idiots” could “theoretically include anyone on any social-media platform who shares news based on a click-bait headline,” Mathew Ingram wrote for Fortune. But the biggest issue was PropOrNot itself. As Adrian Chen wrote for the New Yorker, its methods were themselves suspect, hinting at counter-Russian propaganda - ostensibly with Ukrainian origins - and verification of its work was nearly impossible. Chen wrote “the prospect of legitimate dissenting voices being labelled fake news or Russian propaganda by mysterious groups of ex-government employees, with the help of a national newspaper, is even scarier.” Criticism culminated this week when the "Naked capitalism" blog threatened to sue the Washington Post, demanding a retraction. Now, at least, the "national newspaper" has taken some responsibility, however the key question remains: by admitting it never vetted its primary source, whose biased and conflicted "work" smeared hundreds of websites, this one included, just how is the Washington Post any different from the "fake news" it has been deriding on a daily basis ever since its endorsed presidential candidate lost the elections?