Last Call For WIN THE EVENING

Just because you see something first doesn't mean A) that it's accurate or B) that it's worth writing about.  In the age of social media hoaxes and lightspeed satire, it pays to slow down.

So today, this happened: Bloomberg News fell for a fake news story originally posted at one of those awful sites that plays on confirmation bias to circulate seemingly genuine stories and generate clicks for them: RETRACTED: Nancy Reagan Gives Her Endorsement to … Hillary Clinton? - Bloomberg Politics.

There’s now a notice at the top of the article:

This story has been retracted. We fell for a hoax. Apologies.

And of course the offenders are once again the jokers at "National Report".

Suckers.

Why Slager Will Walk

Not even a week after Officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott eight times in the back, we find the campaign to make sure Slager is acquitted in the court of public opinion is on in earnest.

Saturday's traffic stop opens like so many others as Scott was stopped in a used Mercedes-Benz he had purchased days earlier, footage from the patrol car showed. At the outset, it's a strikingly benign encounter: The officer is seen walking toward the driver's window, requesting Scott's license and registration. Slager then returns to his cruiser. On the dash cam video, Slager never touches his gun during the stop. He also makes no unreasonable demands or threats. 

The video also shows Scott beginning to get out of the car, his right hand raised above his head. He then quickly gets back into the car and closes the door. After Slager goes back to his patrol car, minutes later, Scott jumps from his car and runs. Slager chases him. 

What's missing is what happens from the time the two men run out of the frame of dashboard video to the time picked up in a bystander's cellphone video a few hundred yards away. The cellphone footage starts with Scott getting to his feet and running away, then Slager firing eight shots at the man's back. 

"It is possible for something to happen in that gap to significantly raise the officer's perception of risk," Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and criminal law professor at the University of South Carolina. 

Scott was almost $7,500 behind in child support and had been in jail three times over the issue, but no bench warrants had been issued directing officers to bring him in. His family has said that he might have run because he was behind on payments again and didn't want to go back to jail. He last paid child support in 2012, court records show.

All Slager has to do in order to walk is testify that Scott tried to attack him during the period Scott ran from the traffic stop until the cell phone video opens, and that he feared for his life.

No jury will convict him. Not in the murder of a black man, because black men are vermin to be exterminated and shot in the back.  We don't count as human, you see.

Slager will lie, and he will walk.  And he'll quietly be hired back as a police officer somewhere.

And Walter Scott will be dead because he was black.

Cruz (Information) Control

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz is in the "evil liberal media is using my verbatim quotes against me, the bastards!" phase of the campaign, which should last right up until the point he pulls out next year.

In an interview with CNBC, GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz expressed anger towards the “left-wing editorial writers” who liked to call him out for making “non-factual statements.” 

Cruz, speaking to John Harwood during a ten-question interview, dismissed the tendency of people to do things like fact-check his claims supporting his argument that the IRS should be abolished:

HARWOOD: You’ve said a few things that don’t necessarily comport with the facts, like, “125,000 I.R.S. agents, send ‘em to the border.” They’ve only got 25,000 agents or something like. You’ve talked about the job-killing nature of Obamacare. We’re adding jobs at a very healthy clip right now. Why shouldn’t somebody listen to you and say, “The guy’ll just say anything – doesn’t have to be true”? 

CRUZ: There is a game that is played by left-wing editorial writers. It’s this new species of yellow journalism called PolitiFact. Colloquially I was referring to all the employees as agents. That particular stat is in a joke I used. So, they’re literally fact-checking a joke. I say that explicitly tongue in cheek.

Get it?  Any time Ted Cruz says something ridiculously non factual, it's stupid liberals fact-checking a joke and anyone who looks to fact-check his statements are "yellow journalists."

Dear political journalists: you are the enemy to any Republican.  They would see you destroyed as much as they would want to even look at you.  Why treat them as anything other than a cancer on our body politic?

StupidiNews!

• President Obama will meet with Cuban President Raul Castro today, the first time leaders of the two nations have met in more than 50 years.
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to formally announce her candidacy for the White House in 2016 as early as this weekend.
• At least 31 people were killed in a bus crash in Morocco when the bus caught on fire immediately after colliding with a truck.
• France is now getting more than 4,000 megawatts of power from solar in 2015, a new record for the country, as Europe moves towards more green energy sources.
• Online giant Amazon is taking services that sell fake 5-star reviews of products to court, suing a California man who runs a service to "boost product review scores".