Last Call For The Village Idiots

Not only has the NY Post's "bombshell" story on Hunter Biden been revealed to most likely be deliberate Russian disinformation shopped to the paper through Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, but now the NY Post story itself is falling apart as there are now several questions about how the story came to be coming from NY Post staff themselves.

 

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

Top editors met on Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Mr. Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor in chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor in chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor in chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.

As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused, two Post journalists said. A Post spokeswoman had no comment on how the article was written or edited.

Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.

Ms. Morris did not have a bylined article in The Post before Wednesday, a search of its website showed. She arrived at the tabloid in April after working as an associate producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her Instagram account, which was set to private on Wednesday, included photos of her posing with the former Trump administration members Mr. Bannon and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as Roger J. Stone Jr., a friend and former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump. (In July, the president commuted the sentence of Mr. Stone on seven felonies.)

Ms. Fonrouge had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article, said three people with knowledge of how it was prepared. She learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published, the people said.

 

Expect more of this garbage fire propaganda in the last two weeks as the Trumpies empty their vomitorium of bullshit in hope of making something stick to Biden. If anything, it's a life preserver to try to keep the most rabid members of the base believing they have a shot at winning when they don't. Not even Rupert Murdoch's choicest US tabloid is backing this story.

Besides, even FOX News passed on this obvious disinformation. Colby Hall at Mediaite:

Mediaite has learned that Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch. The tabloid has been exhaustively covering the contents of the laptop — which include everything from emails regarding Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian company to personal photos of the recovering addict — with each morsel being amplified in the conservative media world, including on Fox News’ top-rated opinion programs. Thus far, the Fox’s News division has only been able to verify one email from the tranche leaked.

The former New York City mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump has long had a working relationship with Fox News, the cable news network whose opinion shows have an overwhelmingly pro-Trump point of view.

But according to two sources familiar with the matter, the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network’s news division to pass. Fox News declined to comment on this story.

Some of Fox News’ top news anchors and reporters have distanced themselves from the story. During an on-air report that largely focused on how social media platforms handled this story, Bret Baier said, “Let’s say, just not sugarcoat it. The whole thing is sketchy.”

“You couldn’t write this script in 19 days from an election, but we are digging into where this computer is and the emails and the authenticity of it,” he added.

Chris Wallace also called the story “suspicious” and said, “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”

It's the same garbage from 2016, only the names have been changed.

 

It won't work, and besides, nearly 30 million Americans have already voted. 

 

It's not 2016. It took long enough for us to get back to a winning hand, but it';s not 2016 anymore.

Let's finish them off.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Still A Problem

It's depressingly terrible but in no way surprising to me that the main reason Hillary Clinton lost a close electoral college contest to a serial sexual predator coked-up racist game show host was because our broken media has spent literally my entire adult life, more than a quarter-century now, telling anyone they can that Hillary Rodham Clinton is an awful, evil, soul-sucking bitch, and four years after that election we still have millions of Democrats happily voting for Joe Biden now who would still rather have Donald Trump in the White House than Hillary Clinton.

Samantha Kacmarik, a Latina college student in Las Vegas, said that four years ago, she had viewed Hillary Clinton as part of a corrupt political establishment.

Flowers Forever, a Black transgender music producer in Milwaukee, said she had thought Mrs. Clinton wouldn’t change anything for the better.

And Thomas Moline, a white retired garbageman in Minneapolis, said he simply hadn’t trusted her.

None of them voted for Mrs. Clinton. All of them plan to vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I knew early that Trump definitely wasn’t the guy for me,” recalled Mr. Moline, an independent. But when it came to Mrs. Clinton, “I guess I had a bad taste in my mouth from her husband’s eight years in office.” He voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, a decision he regrets, and he feels at ease backing Mr. Biden.

“I identify more with Biden — whether that’s being a male chauvinist, or whatever you want to call me,” he said.

The point seems almost too obvious to note: Mr. Biden is not Mrs. Clinton. Yet for many Democrats and independents who sat out 2016, voted for third-party candidates or backed Mr. Trump, it is a rationale for their vote that comes up repeatedly: Mr. Biden is more acceptable to them than Mrs. Clinton was, in ways large and small, personal and political, sexist and not, and those differences help them feel more comfortable voting for the Democratic nominee this time around.

Mr. Biden also benefits, of course, from the intense desire among Democrats to get President Trump out of office. And a majority of voters give the president low marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant issue of the race. But a key distinction between 2020 and 2016 is that, four years ago, the race came down to two of the most disliked and polarizing candidates in American history, and one of them also faced obstacles that came with being a barrier-breaking woman.

Mr. Biden now leads Mr. Trump in many public polls by bigger margins than Mrs. Clinton had in 2016. In private polling and focus groups, voters express more positive views of Mr. Biden than of Mrs. Clinton, though they know far less about his decades in political office, according to strategists affiliated with both Democrats’ campaigns.

Interviews with dozens of voters, union members and Democratic strategists reveal a party embracing Mr. Biden — a 77-year-old white man — as a familiar political pitch, though some bristled at what they saw as the gender bias in that assessment.

“The Republicans did a fantastic job of making Hillary Clinton seem like the devil for the last 20-plus years, so she was a hard sell,” said Aaron Stearns, the Democratic chairman in Warren County in northwestern Pennsylvania. “It’s just a lot easier with Joe Biden because he’s a guy and he’s an old white guy. I hate saying that, but it’s the truth.”

And four years later there are still people who blame Clinton's loss on her "being a bitch." It amazes me how stupid people are, even after documenting the atrocities for the last dozen years on this blog. 

So yeah, the chief factor in Biden's win is going to end up being that he isn't Hillary Clinton.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Good morning.

Republicans are racists, and they can't stop being racist.

U.S. Sen. David Perdue intentionally flubbed the name of Joe Biden’s running-mate Kamala Harris at a rally Friday for President Donald Trump in Macon, drawing immediate criticism from his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff and others who called it a “racist tactic.”

As Perdue warned that the Democratic presidential ticket of Biden and Harris would bring “radical socialism” to the country if elected, Perdue dramatically struggled with Harris' name, to the delight of the crowd.

“Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know. Whatever.”

Harris and Perdue have served together in the U.S. Senate since 2017, including as members of the Senate Budget Committee. His campaign spokesman John Burke said the Republican “simply mispronounced Senator Harris' name and he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“He was making an argument against the radical socialist agenda that she and her endorsed candidate Jon Ossoff are pushing,” he said.

Ossoff swiftly criticized his Republican opponent on social media.

“We are so much better than this,” Ossoff tweeted, urging supporters to chip into his campaign. He later added: “We are so much better than this.”

And Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said he owes voters an apology.

“Senator Perdue’s intentionally disrespectful mispronunciation of Senator Harris' name is a bigoted and racist tactic straight from President Trump’s handbook,” said Williams.

Long a staunch Trump loyalist, Perdue earlier told the crowd that the president had been sent by God.

“This guy is providential. He didn’t happen by accident,” Perdue said. “How in the world in our political system could Donald J. Trump come on the scene in 2016 do what he did? Tell me. God’s watching.”

The Trump campaign scheduled the rally in Macon as a series of recent polls show Trump and former vice president Joe Biden neck-and-neck in Georgia. Trump, who won the state by 5 percentage points in 2016, has little clear path to victory if he loses Georgia in November.

Along with Perdue, state GOP leaders including Gov. Brian Kemp, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Rep. Doug Collins, former Georgia governor and current Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and 14th district GOP nominee Marjorie Taylor Greene also attended the rally for Trump.

 

They trashed Obama's name for years and they still do. They'll trash Kamala Harris's name and they will. But they'll have to put President in front of Obama, and they'll soon have to put Vice-President in front of Kamala Harris, and they damn well know it.

 

It's far from just Perdue, too. Look at the crew of assholes at the Trump Georgia rally, Brian Kemp, mask hater and racist voter subtraction master, Doug Collins, who happily defended Trump's racists tweets time and again, Sonny Perdue, corrupt Agriculture Secretary and food shortage guru, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon racist, anti-Semite, and general conspiracy crank.

 

What white supremacist Republican racists hate that more than anything is that their kids will learn to pronounce Kamala correctly and start to see her as a human being.

StupidiNews!

• New wildfire evacuations continue in Colorado and Utah as fresh blazes in both states have already scorched a combined 10,000 acres over the weekend.
• Israel says the latest Middle East country it plans to normalize ties with is Bahrain, embattled PM Benjamin Netanyahu says a deal could be reached next month.
• Thousands protested at the Supreme Court building on Saturday to demonstrate against Donald Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court.
• A year after President Evo Morales fled the country, Bolivians return to the polls to elect a new President and Congress, Morales ally Luis Arce is leading in the polls.
• GM's automated driving startup Cruise has received permission to test five vehicles in San Francisco, CEO Dan Ammann says "truly driverless vehicles" will be in test by 2021.